From the Classic Blues Videos website:
Sonny Boy Williamson II performs “Nine Below Zero” at the American Folk Blues Music Festival in 1963. Introduced by Memphis Slim, with Otis Spann (piano), Matt Murphy (guitar), Willie Dixon (bass) and Billy Stepney (drums).
Thanks to Classic Blues Videos for hipping me to this clip.
— A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
I subscribe to a great website, Classic Blues Videos, and every day they email me a link to a cool blues video.
The other day they sent me to this wonderful performance of “Death Letter Blues” by the great delta blues musician, Son House.
And here’s Son House singing “Walking Blues” in 1942:
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
When I was Editor in Chief at MOG I executive produced these videos of Jolie Holland performing “Mexico City” and “Delia.”
“Mexico City” is one of Holland’s own compositions, and the studio version appears on her album, The Living And The Dead. “Delia” is a Blind Willie McTell song that Bob Dylan also covered. Jolie’s studio version appeared as the B-side of a single released in Europe. Both are favorites of mine.
Jolie Holland has the most soulful voice. She doesn’t sound like anyone but herself. There’s so much depth, so much emotion.
John Tefteller makes his living buying and selling records. In September he paid the most anyone has ever paid for a 78 RPM blues record. The record he bought was Tommy Johnson’s “Alcohol and Jake Blues.”
Why did he pay so much for an old blues 78?
“These original Paramount delta blues records have attained such a mythic status over the years, and there are loads of people who would love to buy one of these things, that it just becomes so legendary,” Tefteller told Fuse. ” When you actually see one for sale, which happens once or twice in a lifetime, you have to make a decision.
“It’s also historically extremely important because there are no masters on these records,” he continued. ” You think of modern-day records and there are master tapes that you can go back to and make new copies of. When you go back to these 1920s and ’30s blues recordings, this is it. The masters were destroyed years ago and there’s no way to recover them. The only way anyone is able to hear this stuff now is to search out an [original] commercial pressing. So when you find one of these blues records in really super nice condition, that’s an earth-shaking event in the record collecting world.”
For more of Fuse’s interview.
And here’s another good story about the
Blind Willie Johnson had a voice that could burn the skin off your back. When he sang he might as well been gargling with rocks. He made Howlin’ Wolf sound like Frank Sinatra. His gospel recordings are legendary. Most famous, perhaps, is “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” or maybe “John The Revelator.”
“Johnson’s music was charred with purgatorial fire — more than sixty years later, you can still smell the smoke on it,” wrote Francis Davis in his book, “The History of the Blues.”
Now a tribute album is in the works. Tom Waits is contributing covers of two songs: “Soul of a Man” and the amazing “John The Revelator.” Lucinda Williams checks in with “Nobody’s Fault But Mine,” the Cowboy Junkies recorded “Jesus Coming Soon,” and there are contributions from the Blind Boys of Alabama, Luther Dickinson, Rickie Lee Jones, Sinead O’Connor and more.
To fund the project, producer Jeffrey Gaskill is using Kickstarter. For more of the story, or if you’re interested in checking out what you get for what you give, head to this Kickstarter page.
Listen to “John The Revelator”:
And “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was the Ground.”
A 78 RPM recording by the ’30s blues musician Tommy Johnson sold on eBay for $37,100, according to Broadway World. That’s reportedly the highest price ever paid for a 78 blues RPM record.
Tommy Johnson, no relation to Robert Johnson, was an influential delta blues musician who died in 1956. He recorded in the 1920s.
The record that sold on eBay features “Alcohol And Jake Blues” and “Ridin’ Horse.”
Listen to “Alcohol And Jake Blues” right now.
Read more about this story at Broadway World.
A years in the making documentary on the great blues guitarist Michael Bloomfield, “Sweet Blues: A Film About Michael Bloomfield,” will be premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival in Mill Valley, CA, on October 11. Filmmaker Bob Sarles spent 25 years working on the documentary.
A taste of Bloomfield’s inimitable playing:
Bloomfield first came to national attention as a member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a favorite of the counter-culture rock crowd
in the late ’60s. As a session guitarist he played on Bob Dylan’s album, Highway 61 Revisited, including Dylan’s Top 40 hit, “Like A Rolling Stone,” and was the lead guitarist in the band Dylan used at his infamous Newport Folk Festival performance, which was the first rock ‘n’ roll performance of Dylan’s professional career.
To introduce Bloomfield on November 15, 1980, when the guitarist joined Dylan for a performance of “Like A Rolling Stone” at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, Dylan talked about meeting Bloomfield for the first time: “I was playing in a club in Chicago, I guess it was about 1956, or nineteen-sixty. And I was sittin’ there, I was sittin’ in a restaurant, I think it was, probably across the street, or maybe it was even part of the club, I’m not sure — but a guy came down and said that he played guitar. So he had his guitar with him, and he begin to play, I said, ‘Well what can you play?’ and he played all kinds of things, I don’t know if you’ve heard of a man, does Big Bill Broonzy ring a bell? Or, ah, Sonny Boy Williamson, that type of thing? He just played circles, around anything I could play, and I always remembered that.” (Thank you Greil Marcus, for including Dylan’s introduction in your book, “Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan At The Crossroads”.)
So Dylan hired a great blues guitarist for the Highway 61 Revisited sessions, but he was intent on making his first full-bore rock album, so Dylan gave Bloomfield cryptic instructions before the sessions began.
“I went to his house first to hear the tunes,” Bloomfield said in a June 1968 interview for Hit Parader. “The first thing I heard was ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ He wanted me to get the concept of it, how to play it. I figured he wanted blues, string bending, because that’s what I do. He said, ‘Hey, man, I don’t want any of that B. B. King stuff.’ So, OK, I really fell apart. What the heck does he want? We messed around with the song. I played the way that he dug and he said it was groovy.
“Then we went to the session,” Bloomfield continued. “Bob told me, ‘You talk to the musicians, man, I don’t want to tell them anything.’ So we get to the session. I didn’t know anything about it. All these studio cats are standing around. I come in like a dumb punk with my guitar over my back, no case, and I’m telling people about this and that, and this is the arrangement, and do this on the bridge. These are like the heaviest studio musicians in New York. They looked at me like I was crazy.”
Bloomfield and his band, The Electric Flag, at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967:
Bloomfield’s biggest success came with the release of Super Session, a jam with Steven Stills and Al Kooper that reached #12 on the Billboard Top 200 in 1968, the year of its release.
Bloomfield is considered one rock’s greatest guitar players; he was ranked #22 in Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Guitarists Of All TIme.”
Bloomfield became addicted to heroin, and in the early ’70s, maintained a low profile, spending much of his time at his house in Mill Valley, CA. As a teenager, a friend and I knocked on Bloomfield’s front door one afternoon. He opened the door, and when we told him we were big fans, he invited us in. That day he spoke to us freely about the blues, as well as his sessions with Dylan. The following year when my friend and I were putting on dance concerts at Tam High in Mill Valley, Bloomfield agreed to play, and with a pickup band headlined the show at the high school auditorium and delivered what I remember as a knock-out performance.
For the rest of his life, Bloomfield played occasional club dates around the Bay Area, sometimes with the exceptional blues pianist Sunnyland Slim, including a terrific set I caught at the Opal Cliffs Inn in Santa Cruz. He was found dead of a drug overdose on February 15, 1981. He was 37 years old.
In the documentary, Sarles includes interviews with numerous people who knew Bloomfield including guitarist Carlos Santana, harmonica ace Charlie Musslewhite, singer/songwriter Country Joe McDonald, guitarist Elvin Bishop, B.B King, Al Kooper and many more.
Bluesman Charlie Musslewhite talks about Bloomfield in the film:
Concert promoter Bill Graham on Bloomfield: