― xhuxk, Wednesday, 4 January 2006 22:20 (eighteen years ago) link
When I reviewed Toby I said that that in a better world "That's Not How It Is" would get play on the Urban AC stations. The song seems to split the difference between Isaac Hayes and Robert Cray. It's more an '80s sound than a '70s (though of course Hayes goes back farther than that).
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Wednesday, 4 January 2006 22:25 (eighteen years ago) link
Black-gospel-based r&b-pop not unlike Whitney, Mariah, Toni (which certainly is soul-related and certainly draws on Ray Charles), but actually I hear something countrypolitan in the tone, though I can't put my finger on it, just as there's something countrypolitan in Celine Dion's tone, though whatever it is it was probably derided as one of the things that made countrypolitan "not country."
To confuse matters, I'll point out that "One" has reggaeish touches in the rhythm.
And to confuse matters more, I think that the Whitney-Mariah-Celine-Faith (though not necessarily Toni) thing draws on Streisand and Garland as well as on Charles, not in the sense that some people find Streisand and Garland camp but rather in S-G's showbiz reaching-for-the-sky moments. Welding Charles and Streisand is intriguing to me since you have Charles' deliberately rough and "sincere" melisma and Streisand's shriek-with-the-birds operatics.
This post is written in what one reviewer called "the Chuck Eddy hyphenated style."
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Wednesday, 4 January 2006 22:45 (eighteen years ago) link
Yeah, but the Kingston Trio clobber the Tokens.
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Thursday, 5 January 2006 06:05 (eighteen years ago) link
― don, Thursday, 5 January 2006 06:29 (eighteen years ago) link
― Roy Kasten (Roy Kasten), Thursday, 5 January 2006 06:41 (eighteen years ago) link
― don, Thursday, 5 January 2006 07:32 (eighteen years ago) link
Also, has anyone seen Tanya Tucker lately? I saw her last summer (pre-reality show) and she totally blew my mind (mind you, this was at an outdoor country festival, 2nd day--so I was drunkx2 and had only a hour earlier been charmed by Mel Tellis). She's coming back on a soft-seat/arena tour (soft-seat in my town, arena in the next, go fig) in the spring, and I'm pretty jazzed.
― Huk-L (Huk-L), Thursday, 5 January 2006 14:59 (eighteen years ago) link
I was reading from this book last night, *Southwest Shuffle: Pioneers of Honky-Tonk, Western Swing, and Country Jazz* by Rich Kienzle. Horrifying chapter about Spade Cooley; I don't know if I'd ever heard the details before about *how* he killed his wife (in front of their 14 year old daughter, who he also threatened if she told anybody) -- totally gruesome, but it makes me curious to pull back out my Spade Cooley album. Which I never liked as much as, say, the Milton Brown and his Brownies or Roy Newman and his Boys or Smokey Wood albums I've got, maybe because (as Kienzle writes) Cooley's innovation was also working California "sweet" music and even classical parts into western swing's varying hillbilly/swing/bebop/blues/polka/Mex/pophybrid -- my guess is, that probably made Cooley less funky and frantic than these guys I like more, but I want to make sure. Jeez, though, what a creepy man. I doubt anybody in my record collection has ever done anything more evil...Anyway, what's really interested me so far in Kienzle's book was how, in the intro, he talks about how, inititally, country music in the 20s was a conscious attempt (idea from record company/radio barn dance execs) to fabricate rural nostalgia, so they at first insisted on keeping instruments that would make the music sound less "pure" (drums, horns, electric guitars) out of it, and that purity pretty much became the standard in the southeast, especially out of urban areas like Nashville and Atlanta -- that is, especially in fundamentalist puritan protestant backwaters throughout the region. But the Catholic Irish/German/ Polish populations in Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis insisted on mixing up country with polkas, hence making it more danceable, and the mix (see above) was even more open-ended in Texas, Oklahoma, and on to Hollywood. So keeping country undanceable, keeping it free of unsavory ethnic influences (including black ones and "urban" ones in general) was in some ways, seemingly, a puritan, even (probably) racist impulse (though I don't think Kienzle uses that word), but also a commercial impulse since the purity was country's inentionally fabricated selling point to begin with. (I.e., purity didn't arise naturally. How this connects to Emmett Miller and Jimmie Rodgers and all the subsequent white guys singing blues in the '20s and '30s I'm not sure - was that stuff *not* considered country then? Or just not saleable? Or was it just really marginal? Or what? Rodgers was obviously a huge star, right?) Anyway, I'm wondering whether one could trace the "pure country" vs. "eclectic country" dichotomy across decades, from then til now. I've always suspected insisting on keeping dance music or pop music out of c&w was a puritan impulse, and this says it was from the start. There's a big story in between.
― xhuxk, Thursday, 5 January 2006 15:32 (eighteen years ago) link
― xhuxk, Thursday, 5 January 2006 15:42 (eighteen years ago) link
― xhuxk, Thursday, 5 January 2006 16:03 (eighteen years ago) link
Or maybe not. I'm hearing more of the swing every time I play this thing; it's just really subtle, is all. First song is called "W. Lee O'Daniel and the Light Crust Dough Boys," which band name is clearly a Western Swing reference in and of itself.
― xhuxk, Thursday, 5 January 2006 16:06 (eighteen years ago) link
― xhuxk, Thursday, 5 January 2006 16:18 (eighteen years ago) link
― xhuxk, Thursday, 5 January 2006 16:38 (eighteen years ago) link
― don, Thursday, 5 January 2006 16:55 (eighteen years ago) link
― don, Thursday, 5 January 2006 17:11 (eighteen years ago) link
Not me, but Mazor gives her new concert DVD Tanya Tucker Live at Billy Bob's Texas (Smith Music Group) a thumbs up in the new ND.
― Roy Kasten (Roy Kasten), Thursday, 5 January 2006 17:17 (eighteen years ago) link
I'll have to read the "Southwest Shuffle" book, because the diff between "country" in "protestant backwaters" and country in Cinci, St. Louis, Chicago, Texas/Oklahoma and out to California seems to explain, or open up, a lot of stuff that I think is really essential. and today, I think the tension between California-ized ideas of "country" and what Nashville thinks it is--it also seems really basic to me.
― edd s hurt (ddduncan), Thursday, 5 January 2006 19:06 (eighteen years ago) link
― George the Animal Steele, Thursday, 5 January 2006 19:18 (eighteen years ago) link
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:ncex97qjkrjt
http://www.oldblues.net/music/yazoo/yazoorecord/10241-1.jpg
The latter is a great Yazoo comp called "Mr. Charlie's Blues."
On the other hand, were they considered "blues singers" when they actually existed, or only in retrospect? I honestly have no idea.
― xhuxk, Thursday, 5 January 2006 19:34 (eighteen years ago) link
― xhuxk, Thursday, 5 January 2006 19:37 (eighteen years ago) link
― don, Friday, 6 January 2006 19:46 (eighteen years ago) link
― don, Friday, 6 January 2006 19:53 (eighteen years ago) link
Another one: Tennessee Ernie Ford, whose proto-rock'n'roll (esp "Sixteen Tons") was huge in the years before Elvis. He was, along with Moon Mullican (who he worked with) one of the country-boogie missing links between western swing and rockabilly; tracks like "Shotgun Boogie" and "Blackberry Boogie" are totally raucous. But he also did really did blues stuff like "Dark as a Dungeon" (about coal-mining, and morbidly appropriate this week, sad to say.)
― xhuxk, Friday, 6 January 2006 20:01 (eighteen years ago) link
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Friday, 6 January 2006 21:22 (eighteen years ago) link
― edd s hurt (ddduncan), Friday, 6 January 2006 23:45 (eighteen years ago) link
― xhuxk, Saturday, 7 January 2006 00:28 (eighteen years ago) link
http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/statusainthood/archives/2006/01/country_music_g_1.php
― xhuxk, Saturday, 7 January 2006 02:10 (eighteen years ago) link
― edd s hurt (ddduncan), Saturday, 7 January 2006 02:23 (eighteen years ago) link
― don, Saturday, 7 January 2006 03:30 (eighteen years ago) link
― don, Saturday, 7 January 2006 04:52 (eighteen years ago) link
i am in the middle of reading deloria for the book, can you tell me more about his work in relation to pop culture, i only know him as (a radical, important and cogent) theologian.
― anthony easton (anthony), Saturday, 7 January 2006 05:56 (eighteen years ago) link
Edd, I'm not making sense of this passage, especially the statement "blues was really underground before about 1960 or so when Fahey and Calt and those guys rousted Skip James and Son House out of their obscurity." Interestingly enough, a couple of months ago I read Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, and the impression I got was that "blues", not "jazz," was the basic name for nearly all black popular music between the wars that featured singers rather than instrumental soloists. So a lot that we might in retrospect be calling black pop or rhythm and blues or jazz was all lumped together under the name "blues"; and the reason so much of this stuff is no longer called blues is that starting with John Hammond, white people tended to narrow the definition of "blues." And (if I am remembering/understanding Wald correctly), the broad usage of the term "blues" by black people carried over into the forties and fifties, so if you were to ask a black person in those decades to name a blues musician, they'd name someone like Louis Jordan or Dinah Washington. Blues was not underground, even if Skip James and Son House (who'd never been stars in the first place) were underground. The people Don mentioned - B.B. King, Nat King Cole, Bobby Blue Bland, et al. - were all called blues singers and were all popular black entertainers, as of course were Big Boy Crudup, Junior Parker, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Big Joe Turner but also a whole bunch of West Coast guys with smoother styles who've therefore been written out of history. A gentle smooth number like Chuck Berry's "Wee Wee Hours" would have been considered blues every bit as much as something like "Hoochie Coochie Man." So your original question about the difference or nondifference between jazz and blues singing is on the mark, but from the other side, as it were.
As for Teagarden - yes, I've heard him referred to as a jazz guy, but who knows what he was referred to in his time? (And what about Louis Prima?) The fact that Elvis veered more towards Junior Parker and Big Boy Crudup and Kokomo Arnold than towards the Carter Family - whose material probably wasn't altogether different from those blues guys'; didn't they do their own equivalent to "Mystery Train"? - may be why someone may have called him blues, if anybody did.
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Saturday, 7 January 2006 06:59 (eighteen years ago) link
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Saturday, 7 January 2006 07:07 (eighteen years ago) link
― edd s hurt (ddduncan), Saturday, 7 January 2006 15:36 (eighteen years ago) link
― xhuxk, Saturday, 7 January 2006 15:58 (eighteen years ago) link
― xhuxk, Saturday, 7 January 2006 16:03 (eighteen years ago) link
― don, Saturday, 7 January 2006 16:56 (eighteen years ago) link
― xhuxk, Saturday, 7 January 2006 19:30 (eighteen years ago) link
― Haikunym (Haikunym), Saturday, 7 January 2006 23:45 (eighteen years ago) link
According to AMG, neither "Strokin'" nor any other Clarence Carter song charted country.
― Joseph McCombs (Joseph McCombs), Sunday, 8 January 2006 01:46 (eighteen years ago) link
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Sunday, 8 January 2006 03:01 (eighteen years ago) link
― anthony easton (anthony), Sunday, 8 January 2006 03:43 (eighteen years ago) link
― don, Sunday, 8 January 2006 05:04 (eighteen years ago) link
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Sunday, 8 January 2006 06:35 (eighteen years ago) link
Gotta be the case. Last time I saw her on TV she lives in one of the pit desert towns on California, making it hard to believe she'd care what the Voice publishes unless it was pointed out with the admonition to launch a protest. So please to remove "lock 'n' loll"from that review, y'know.
You'll want to be on the lookout for Copperhead's "Live & Lost." Southern rock band with guitar density equiv to "Big Boss Man" by the Headhunters. (Although the copperhead is the northern Pennsylvania strain of the eastern cottonmouth, or water moccasin, so maybe they should have called themselves, Massassauga, the native American name for it and risked getting picketed.) Listening to it repeatedly convinced me my dislike of bands like the Drive By-Truckers is legitimate. Tunes-wise, it hassome good ones although the titles make you think "dreck."
And it has no relationship with the stoner rock contingent that triesto regularly pass itself off as southern rock or influenced by Skynyrd/ZZ/blah-blah, anything classic rock to get you to listen to the same old horribly bowdlerized Sabbath ribs (and if you think this means I'm talking about The Sword, a contender for most foolish and annoying Texas band I heard late last year, you're right).
Killer version of "Whiskey & Mama" and it's not even the second or third best song on the disc. "Keepin' On" would be great for CMT and all of it would be like Keith Urban if Urban turned up the guitar,added a loud organ and sounded as classic rocker who rides a motorcycle as he looks. Vocals don't sound Urban, they sound Ricky Medlocke.
Funny, these days I'm getting the best sounds off the frustrated and desperate vanity pressings distributed by CD Baby. If you can sift them on-line, not at CD Baby proper [and I'm not giving away my patented trade secret on how to do it, sorry, although ask private] there are surprises surprisingly easy to find. Which you can't locate via Google or by reading webzines, although -after- you find them, you can track down one or two reviews, almost always on web-only publications in Europe in foreign languages where they are still big on US classic rock. [Thanks Google "translate this page" tab.]
― George the Animal Steele, Sunday, 8 January 2006 19:49 (eighteen years ago) link
I think a lot of DJs were making the connections as soon as they heard the rockabilies' records; likewise some of the less up-tight press. Guralnick cites a Billboard review of "Good Rockin' Tonight" from Fall 1954: "Elvis Presley proves again that he is a sock new singer with his performances on these two oldies. His style is both country and r.&b. and he can appeal to pop." And another Billboard review from December 1954: "...the hottest piece of merchandise on the...Louisiana Hayride at the moment is Elvis Presley, the youngster with the hillbilly blues beat." Not exactly visionary criticism but kinda accurate. (We should collectively vow to reintroduce the adjective "sock" to the rock crit lexicon.)
― Roy Kasten (Roy Kasten), Sunday, 8 January 2006 19:51 (eighteen years ago) link
if Pete Holsapplewas really Paul Westerberg,and was on steroids
― Haikunym (Haikunym), Sunday, 8 January 2006 19:54 (eighteen years ago) link
― George the Animal Steele, Sunday, 8 January 2006 20:00 (eighteen years ago) link
― Roy Kasten (Roy Kasten), Sunday, 8 January 2006 20:15 (eighteen years ago) link