belarus old woman blues

A couple of days from now I'm gonna post something about Furry Lewis. But while I was trailing him down on the tube I found the blues in Belarus. Yeah, she's playing a guitar with a lightbulb. A lightbulb. Dig it. Looks exactly like something Furry would have picked-up and practiced while working medicine shows in his younger days. Furry and the lightbulb-playing babushka could probably have a long conversation as they finished off a quart of the good stuff. But, really, watch this woman just play the blues, offering up her own version of what I would guess to be a traditional folk song. Again, in a deep way she mirrors Furry: Someone from the country playing a folk blues in a modern city with people walking by and praying for a ruble or a dime. And I love how utterly unconcerned she is with a videotaping device taking her in, not looking up for anything. She's playing and doesn't care a single whit for that device you have in your hands. World Wide Country Blues.

Thanksgiving Cornucopia

That's Grandma Ann hanging out in her living room on the eastern shore of Maryland. 95 years old and full of laughter, good cheer, and yeah, some well-earned piss&vinegar intransigence every now and then. This past summer she had to stay in a nursing home of sorts to recover from some heart and lung issues. For lunch one day we got in the automobile and took ourselves out to a favorite place of hers on the water. She'd lost her hearing-aid at the nursing home, so she had a rigged hearing-aid in place. While it helped, she was not really able to participate in the conversation. So she sat there in silence, enjoying her delicious crabcake sandwich at a spot she'd been to many many times over her long life. As it came time to leave, Grandma Ann tried repeatedly to get up from the bench. I was sitting opposite her and watched as she tried again and again to stand up on her own (she refused help). After the fifth or so time, she sat back down, looked straight at me and said with real joy "this has been a wonderful day." Here's a woman near the end of her life, dependent upon a walker to get around, spending most of the hours of her days in a nursing home, and seemingly not capable of standing up on her own - a set of circumstances I'd call frustrating, to say the least - and the words close to her lips are words of thanks. It broke my heart. And it made me question my easy frustrations, my easy words of disappointment, my easy selfishness. The world moves pretty fast and we find endless ways to justify our petty actions and words, never slowing down to think about just how little we are asking of ourselves as we stroll through the world with ever-reliable blinders on. Thankfulness resides inside of you, right now, this moment. Grandma Ann showed you so.

This six-pack is for her.

The first coldie to get cracked features Gaither Carlton on fiddle and his son-in-law Doc Watson on guitar. Taken from the Friends of Old Time Music boxset, here's what Watson had to say about "Double File":

It’s an old tune they used to square dance to a long time ago. They used to have some of them old shindigs and just about shake the log cabins down. Boy, they’d really romp it up, I’m telling you.

"Boy, they'd really romp it up" does a pretty good job of summing of the rest of the set as well.

Doc Watson & Gaither Carlton- Double File

Elvis Perkins - Stop Drop Rock and Roll

Sir Douglas Band- San Francisco FM Blues

Andre Williams & 2 Star Tabernacle - Jet Black Daddy Lilly White Mama

Dexateens - Spark

The Faces - Devotion

No Thanksgiving would be complete without a little ol' Grateful Dead. Here's a show from November 24th, 1972, when the Dead played Dallas.


While running in circles on the youtube last night I found Levon hanging out with Sissy Spacek in 1980, right about the time they played the father and daughter roles in Coalminer's Daughter. In her biography, Loretta says that one of her daughter's came up to her after listening to Spacek singing one of Lynn's tunes and saying "mama, she sounds more like you than you do." So let's serve another six pack just for the hell of it.

Scotty Stidham

Come On Everybody, Let's Do The Hawg!

What do you get when you combine ferocious post war urban blues harmonica and early 60s Memphis r&b: Eddie Kirkland's "The Hawg, Part 1." After parting ways with John Lee Hooker and getting a gig with Otis Redding in Macon, Kirkland followed Otis to McLemore Avenue where with Booker T and the MGs providing the funk he promptly unleashed harmonica fury on Stax-Volt. And as up front as Kirkland's harmonica is, Steve Cropper's guitar gets buried deep in a well, adding another unique aspect to this recording.

Eddie Kirkland - The Hawg, Part 1

rebellion in these rhymes

A few years back my friend Jack Herranen gathered some musicians together in New Orleans and cooked-up To Fan the Flames of Discontent: The Living Songs of Joe Hill. Working through songs from the IWW's Little Red Song Book, Jack and the Ninth Ward Conspiracy did right by these fighting for freedom folk songs, and in doing so carried on a tradition of resisting the depredations of capitalism through song and togetherness. One of the best songs on the album, "Remember" by Harrison George, speaks directly to those gathering under the OWS banner to say No! to political and economic elites drunk on power and the almighty dollar.

Remember -- Jack Herranen and the Ninth Ward Conspiracy [buy]

More recently, Jack's been producing a new album with some east Tennessee friends. While getting the album together in Knoxville, Jack sat down and played a set of tunes for Eleven O'Clock Rock on knox.ivi.com. Here's a clip from the show, with Jack singing his own "Runa Blues."


If you do a bit of scrolling, you can screen Jack's entire set on Eleven O'Clock Rock..