New: A Brand New Me

Dusty Springfield: A Brand New Me

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Released two weeks into a new decade – the 1970s – A Brand New Me was the title of Dusty Springfield’s first and only Philly album, and the title of the hit single from the LP (which would be released in Britain a month later as From Dusty…With Love).

Having previously done the Southern Soul thing with the immortal Dusty In Memphis album, Dusty now turned to Philly soul under the guidance of producers Kevin Gamble and Leon Huff, who together or with others wrote all songs on the album, and arranger Thom Bell.

The single “A Brand New Me”, a cover of Jerry Butler’s 1969 single which had been written by Gamble, Butler and Bell, provided Dusty with her last US hit for 17 years, reaching #24 in 1970. In her native Britain it didn’t even chart. In both countries, she’d not feature in the Top 40 for 17 years, when the Pet Shop Boys revived her career.

The album itself tanked, stalling at #107 in the Billboard charts, and a second set of recordings with Gamble and Huff was shelved.

When the album was made, Gamble and Huff were still relatively unknown and Dusty Springfield was a star. Soon the producers would become soul giants as serial hitmakers for The O’Jays, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Billy Paul, The Three Degrees and so on, and would be invited to write the theme for Soul Train (read the story of that here).

New: The New Soft Shoe

Gram Parsons: The New Soft Shoe

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E.L. Cord was a visionary and innovator, the brains behind the famed Cord automobile of the 1920s and ‘30s. Cords were the first to sport front-wheel drive and retractable headlights. As technologically advanced as his cars were, Cord was known for lavishing even more attention on the way his vehicles looked. That tendency to put style ahead of profits had predictable results. Cord was derided by rivals, and his company, Illinois-based Auburn Automobile, went belly up during the Depression. Later, Cord headed west, where he made and lost and re-made a fortune in investments. He dabbled in politics and bought and sold real estate, oil wells, radio stations and the company that eventually became American Airlines. His critics claimed he lacked focus, his admirers said he was too wild and creative to be pigeonholed.

Something in Cord’s story resonated with Gram Parsons -- himself a restless spirit, who jumped from enterprise to enterprise. In his autobiography, Keith Richards recalls being told by Parsons that he was “writing a song about a guy that builds cars.” That song was “The New Soft Shoe,” one of the shining moments on "G.P.", Parsons’s debut solo album. The Parsons song offers only a brief biographical sketch. But he makes his point: Art has its place. Each generation needs a new Cord. And each will face new challenges.

New: Hope You Like the New Me

Richard Thompson: Hope You Like the New Me

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Richard Thompson can be downright creepy at times. Hope You like the New Me gives another meaning to the term “identity theft” Thompson imagines a narrator who takes everything he admires in a perceived rival, and steals it. The musical setting for this is disturbingly simple, as if Thompson is saying, “see how easy that was!” It’s mostly an acoustic guitar, playing a repeating pattern that changes only by getting louder and then softer. There is a subtle bass part, and a cello joins in for emphasis, and that’s about it. Nevertheless, the tension in the song builds to a climax, and then pulls back a bit, but there is never a release. Thompson’s vocal performance is suitably menacing. This is the kind of song that shows why Richard Thompson is so admired by his fellow musicians. The elements of the song are sparse, but Thompson knows that he has all that he needs, and he makes every bit of it count.

New: New Feeling

Talking Heads: New Feeling

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"The name of this song is 'New Feeling'. That's what it's about."
--David Byrne.

New: Part of the New America

The Groceries: Part of the New America
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I was a college radio DJ at WPRB in Princeton, NJ during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and we enthusiastically supported a couple of local bands—Regressive Aid and The Groceries. Someday, I will try to post about Regressive Aid, who had a few members that went on to more well-known projects, but this post is about The Groceries, particularly, their song Part of the New America.

I liked The Groceries, and almost certainly played them on the air. Through the fog of history, I’m pretty sure that I saw them play live, at both an eating club on campus (Terrace?) and at the somewhat legendary City Gardens in Trenton. Based on some recent research, they are fondly remembered in the Central New Jersey area. They were a good band, with an interesting sound. My friend and former WPRB colleague Hal posted on his blog a few months ago—“The Groceries were musical soup. In today’s terms, boil the Barenaked Ladies, and drop in Bob Marley and flavor with Madness, and you get the taste.” That’s a pretty fair description, and I don’t think I can do better. To my knowledge, were never signed by any record label and I don’t think you can buy it anywhere. (Aside—after I graduated from college, I worked at a major record label for the summer, and worked with another kid my age who later became a serious player in the industry. I found a Groceries tape or record in a pile of submissions and asked him about them—he told me that the band had been trying to get signed for a while, but no one seemed interested.)

The song is a satire of the American materialistic culture that was being fostered by the Reagan administration, but the song also skewers liberals and the “politically correct”. I’d have to say that its message is still timely in the “Occupy” era, too. (Another aside—the lead singer of The Groceries was Richard Auguste Morse, who later moved to Haiti, has released music under the name RAM and bought the supposedly world-famous Hotel Oloffson—and in that role appeared in an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations.) It is a fun song, and if you look on the Internet, you can find an amusing video.

New: New Hymn

James Taylor: New Hymn

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Put away your image of James Taylor as a poetic lightweight, mere chronicler of the gentle muse: though his radio popfolk canon is tailor-made for easy listening, this track is a difficult one, with slant rhymes, an odd flowing meter, and a baffled imagery of the unknown, chock full of despair and darkness.

And yet, in many ways, New Hymn represents the under-appreciated apex of Taylor's prowess as a songwriter. Released only on his 1993 live album, this new hymn lives up to its titular promise, honoring the challenge of modern spirituality head on in a song that lingers long after its final notes fade. If it doesn't give you chills, you're not listening right.

So sit with it for a while: it's worth the visit. Soak in the tensions of the warm harmonies against the known darkness and the unknown fears evoked in its dense lyrical incantation. Note how the arrangement supports its fragmented vision, how the performance so effectively parallels its flares and flashes. Let its tiny coda sink in, and play it again, reveling in the short uplifting moment, the four word rise into hope at the song's end a deliberate echo of the Zen perfection psychedelic visionary Baba Ram Das described. Listen, and then accept its challenge: may we work to be here now, and in every moment, for this year, and for the years to come.

New: New Speedway Boogie

Grateful Dead: New Speedway Boogie

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First of all, let me wish all of our readers a very happy new year.

To start our “New” theme, I wanted to share a song by the Grateful Dead. So, I had to decide whether to post New Minglewood Blues, New, New Minglewood Blues, or All New Minglewood Blues. I could even have gone with an obscure version of the song that is not the Dead at all, called Even Newer Minglewood Blues. I decided to avoid the problem by going with New Speedway Boogie instead.

Now, some of you have probably realized that the picture above is not the Grateful Dead at all, but rather the Rolling Stones. In preparing this post, I finally learned, after all these years, what New Speedway Boogie is about. The free concert at the Altamont Speedway in 1969 was originally conceived as a sort of Woodstock west. The show was headlined by the Rolling Stones, and the Grateful Dead were supposed to be in the line-up, but they decided not to do the show. Where Woodstock is remembered as an outporing of peace and love, Altamont is notorious for the violence that marred the occasion, even resulting in one death. It’s hard to say what accounted for the difference between the two shows. At Altamont, the presence of the Hell’s Angels is frequently cited as the cause of the violence, but the Angels had peacefully provided security at Grateful Dead shows for some time at that point. Whatever the case, Altamont is remembered as the concert shown in the documentary Gimme Shelter, and is sometimes regarded as a marker for the end of the hippie era.

New Speedway Boogie was written in response to the events at Altamont, and the Grateful Dead included the song for about nine months afterwards. The lyrics are typically cryptic, and the band probably assumed that their audiences would know the reference. But the Dead dropped the song from their set lists, possibly because they felt that it was too topical and becoming irrelevant. It would be almost twenty years before the band started playing New Speedway Boogie in their shows again. I heard the song when it was released on Workingman’s Dead in 1970. I was ten years old, so I hope I can be forgiven for not understanding what the song referred to.

In Memoriam: Bill Morrissey

Bill Morrissey: Handsome Molly

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Bill Morrissey: Birches

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His songs were like Elmer Rising's pen and ink masterpieces--you could admire each confidently executed lyrical brushstroke and melodic twist on the finest of scales, and never diminish the overall impression of their honesty and truth. At the height of his powers, on 1989's Standing Eight, 1992's Inside and 1993's Night Train, each Bill Morrissey record contained several songs that each would have been the life's work of a lesser artist. There may have been others writing songs equally detailed as "These Cold Fingers," "The Man From Out Of Town" or "Birches," but none were better.
- Mark Erelli, August, 2011

Darius and I have posted several tracks by Bill Morrissey over the years, including several duets of traditional folk numbers recorded with Greg Brown. But while I appreciate his handy coverage, and posted several of my favorites back in July over at Cover Lay Down, I'm partial to his more pensive songwriting - I count Mark Erelli's cover of Birches, for example, as one of the better covers in my vast collection, though in this case, at least, it's hard to outdo the original. And Handsome Molly was the very first track of his I heard, way back on Legacy, a 1989 folk compilation that perfectly captured the eighties folk movement, and my heart.

But I also owe that song an apology of sorts, one I hope to rectify by sharing it. Because at the time, I wasn't sure what to make of Morrissey's fragile, croaking tenor. It scared me a little, I think; the emotion was raw, and at sixteen, I wasn't ready. And so, although I treasured the album as a whole, I skipped over this track for decades, having not yet outgrown my penchant for the melodic.

Only in the least couple of years have I finally come to appreciate that the best music is most often wrung from a broken instrument, bringing me to Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, and through them, back again to Bill Morrissey, a man well admired by his songwriting peers even as they worried about his lifestyle. And so I rediscovered the genius songwriter, chronicler of pain, his lyrics still and hollow on the surface, yet possessed of intimate and universal depth, each song like a Raymond Carver story. And I shared what I had found, in the very first month of my foray into music blogging, in the form of a feature on his tribute to Mississippi John Hurt, which I highly recommend.

And then I filed him in my mind alongside a hundred other songwriters I admire without dwelling too heavily in their sounds.

And then, just like that, he was gone.

As I wrote on my own blog after his passing, Morrissey had his demons: he was known for his drinking, and the weariness of the solo road warrior which caused no amount of stress and desperation in his actions. The heart disease which killed him before his sixtieth birthday was a symptom of the hard life he led, to be sure. And as Cliff Eberhardt, who as a fellow Fast Folk alumni and friend served as pallbearer to this fallen giant of the folk movement, noted on Facebook after his funeral, “The casket felt so light. That’s when I knew he was really gone, because if his soul was in there with him, that casket would have weighed a ton.” I can offer no more fitting epitaph. May there be no more pain where he lies.

In Memoriam: Charlie Louvin

The Louvin Brothers: When I Stop Dreaming

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Charlie Louvin:"What Are Those Things (With Big Black Wings)?"

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The grand arbiter of what's popular and significant in music (a/k/a Billboard) would have us believe the Louvin Brothers were a minor act in country music. The Louvins scored just one number one hit and had only 11 other charting singles. (About the same as the O'Kanes.) Record sales don't accurately reflect the Louvins' far-reaching influence. Their harmony-soaked sound is echoed in the music of the Everly Brothers, the Byrds, Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris and others. Charlie and Ira Loudermilk began singing as the Louvin Brothers after WWII, achieving their greatest popularity (and Opry membership) in the 1950s. By all accounts, Charlie was a saint and Ira was a jerk. Ira's high-maintenance personality and carousing broke up the act in 1963. Charlie went on to have a productive solo career, logging many more Billboard-certified hits as a soloist than he did as a Louvin Brother. Most of those records, weighed down by 1960s countrypolitan arrangements, are forgotten. The music he made with his brother remained Charlie's claim to fame. While Gram Parsons was the first hipster to cover the Louvins (starting with the Byrds), it was Emmylou Harris's championing of the Louvin catalog that brought Charlie back into the limelight. He toured and recorded with Lucinda Williams, Elvis Costello, Cake and Cheap Trick, among others.

Official recognition by the Country Music Hall of Fame was strangely slow in coming -- the Louvins weren't enshrined until 2003, 40 years after they disbanded. Charlie continued to record and perform live until the end; he succumbed to pancreatic cancer in January 2011.

Guest post by Mt Vernon Mike

In Memoriam: Gerry Rafferty

Gerry Rafferty: Big Change in the Weather

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Stealers Wheel: Outside Looking In

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$125,000 a year in royalties can buy an awful lot of booze. Thanks to "Baker Street", Gerry Rafferty never needed to do anything else after 1978... but drink. He passed away in January of 2010 from liver cancer after spending his last two decades seeped in alcohol. Among his final performances was a five day drinking binge at a five star London hotel which led to both his hospitalization and newspaper headlines that he had "disappeared".

But let's remember the more sober and creative days. The Scottish born singer first played with comedian Billy Connolly and Joe Egan in a folk act called The Humblebums. When they broke up Rafferty and Egan started up Stealers Wheel. I'm posting "Outside Looking In" instead of the more obvious "Stuck In The Middle With You" ( or that Beatlesque gem "Late Again") just to ensure you that dipping deeply in the Stealers Wheel catalog is well worth your time. The duo disbanded in 1975. Only the lawyers got rich.

But with his 1978 album City To City, which sold 5.5 million copies and knocked Saturday Night Fever off the the top of the charts, Gerry Rafferty became a millionaire. ( "Big Change in the Weather" is the B-Side to "Baker Street".) He didn't like being a star. You won't find a treasure trove of Rafferty videos on YouTube. The Proclaimers' Charlie Reid, whose 1987 hit album was produced by Rafferty said " He struck me as a very very very sensitive man and for someone like that, fame was probably not appropriate." 

From the outside, looking in, it appears Gerry Rafferty found his hiding place inside a bottle. But just give a listen to what he left behind.

In Memoriam: Ralph Mooney and Marshall Grant

Ray Price: Crazy Arms

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Waylon Jennings: Rainy Day Woman

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Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two: Luther Played the Boogie

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The names Ralph Mooney and Marshall Grant may not appear above the title on many records. But, their contributions to music were instrumental -- in both senses of the word.

Ralph Mooney co-wrote one of the greatest country songs ever, “Crazy Arms.” It’s been covered zillions of times; Ray Price and Patsy Cline own the best-known versions, and it's one of the few covers in Chuck Berry's Chess catalog. It sounds good every time, in part thanks to some of the greatest lines of despair in country music. (“This ain't no crazy dream, I know that it's real, you’re someone else’s love now.”) But Mooney is even better known as one of the all-time great country sidemen. A pioneering steel guitarist, he’s often associated with the Bakersfield sound and can be heard on the early hits of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. He also did some solo turns and made a fine duet album with James Burton. He found new fame in the 1970s as Waylon Jennings’ steel guitar player. Waylon’s band, The Waylors, lacked a standout lead guitarist. It was Mooney’s licks that propelled the arrangements. Mooney’s and Waylon’s interplay was at its finest on the 1974 hit, “Rainy Day Woman.”

Unlike Mooney, Marshall Grant didn’t leave behind distinctive solos or significant songwriting credits. But, he played an integral role in constructing the sound of Johnny Cash. He was the entire rhythm section of Cash’s original band, the Tennessee Three. (That was the group’s original name, the other two being Luther Perkins and Red Kernodle. They became the Tennessee Two when Kernodle dropped out, and went back to Three after drummer W.S. Holland joined a few years later.) Particularly on the Sun records, before Holland joined the band, it was Marshall Grant’s upright bass that provided the basis for the boom-chick-a-boom sound. The inevitable switch to electric bass dampened Grant’s sound, and his role in Cash’s shows and recordings diminished as players and singers flitted in and out of Cash’s band. He acrimoniously left Cash’s employ in the early 1980s, though the two reconciled shortly before Cash’s death. Grant died in the service of his old boss, after falling ill during rehearsal for a Cash tribute concert organized by Rosanne Cash.

Guest post by Mt Vernon Mike

In Memoriam: Bert Jansch

Pentangle: Sweet Child

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Bert Jansch: Angie

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Most of the time, Bert Jansch is described as a British folk musician. Fair enough, since many of the songs he performed were from the British folk cannon. But Jansch’s first inspiration was the American blues musician Big Bill Broonzy. Broonzy started out playing for dancers in juke joints, so he had to lay down a solid beat. But, on top of that beat, Broonzy had a gift for improvising. He could get that beat so solid that you could still feel it, even when Broonzy wasn’t playing it during a solo. Bert Jansch learned his lessons well, and always provided rock solid rhythm for the group Pentangle, while John Renbourn took the flashy solos. In Pentangle, Jansch also played the intricate finger-picked rhythm lines that are a feature of tradition British folk, and the group added rock, jazz, and even Indian influences. As you can hear on Sweet Child, Jansch could handle it all beautifully. But, as a solo artist, Jansch often looked back to the blues, albeit with a British accent. His performance of Angie is a fine example of this. There is that solid beat, but the freedom of the solos is also very much there. Jansch did not play by the musical rules, which is a fine definition of creativity. But he always gave the song what it needed. He won’t be laying down that solid beat any more, but I can still feel it.

In Memoriam: Amy Winehouse

Amy Winehouse: Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow

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There's not much left to say about R&B crooner Amy Winehouse, whose July death by "misadventure" was foretold clearly by her blazing climb to fame - a trail littered by drug abuse, acts of violence, dangerous weight fluctuations, publicity disasters, and mental illness. But though the somewhat ironic posthumous autobiography that remains in the form of gigantic radio hits such as Rehab and You Know I'm No Good was all the rage on the blogs in the hot summer of her passing, the aching soul she brings to this Carole King hit always made me believe there was still a little girl in there, all hope and heart, struggling to break free.

Now a member of the pseudo-mythical 27 Club, Winehouse takes her place alongside Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Robert Johnson, Brian Jones (Rolling Stones), Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (Grateful Dead), Chris Bell (Big Star), Kristen Pfaff (Hole), and many more interpretative geniuses whose flames burned out in their youth, all casualties of the conflagrant combination of the fickle temptation of fame and the fragility of the body. May her life and death remind us of how precious, and how volatile, the life of the artist on the edge can be.

In Memoriam: Isshi

Kagrra,: Haha e

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Kagrra,: Arishi Hi no Bishou

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One of the saddest things in Japanese culture is the high rate of early deaths of her young, which isn't ever discussed properly. Instead, we read terse announcements such as this one about the death of 32-year-old singer Isshi, whose band Kagrra disbanded this year, only to be followed by the dispassionate notice of the lead singer's death. The reason was not, nor will ever be, discussed in public, but I'm inferring suicide. And as a fan of the band it saddens me to read this.

Kagrra, embraced the visual kei genre with a Japan-heavy twist. They performed in traditional garb, titled their songs in Japanese as well, and didn't try to emulate the Engrish-laden lyrics of other groups. Their album covers were gorgeous, and I featured them earlier this year in cool covers week, sadly a short week before Isshi died. Isshi's voice began to fail after their 10-year run as a popular VK group, and the band broke up earlier this year, calling it the demise of Kagrra,. They'll definitely be missed.

In Memoriam: Loleatta Holloway

Loleatta Holloway: Cry To Me

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Among the soul deaths this year were those of Marv Tarplin (you know his guitar from “Tracks Of My Tears” and virtually every Smokey Robinson hit), Sylvia Robinson (founder of Sugar Hill Records and a soul singer in her own right), Coasters founder Carl Gardner, Dobie Gray, Vesta Williams, Gene McDaniels, Marvin Sease, Howard Tate, Gladys Horton of The Marvelettes, percussionist Ralph MacDonald, guitarists Cornell Dupree and Melvin Sparks, J Blackfoot of The Soul Children, St Clair Lee of The Hues Corporation, Donald Banks of The Tymes and – above all – Nick Ashford.

But the death I want to highlight is that of Loleatta Holloway, whose voice was behind one of the biggest international hits of 1989, without her getting credit for it. The hit was “Ride On Time” by Black Box, sung on the video by a beautiful, thin girl. Loleatta was not thin, and the lithe girl was not the singer.

“Ride On Time” sampled profusely from Loleatta Holloway’s 1980 dance number “Love Sensation”, right down to her vocals, on which she sang “right on time”; the Italians producers of the Black Box hit thought it was “ride on time”, hence the title. The producers of “Ride On Time” had cleared the samples with Salsoul, who had released “Love Sensation”, but Hathaway rightly insisted that she should receive royalties from the 1989 hit which, after all, would have been pretty uninteresting without her vocals. A settlement was reached eventually.

So Loleatta Holloway is mostly remembered as a disco queen and the subject of the “Ride On Time” story. But before “Love Sensation”, she was a great soul singer. Especially her 1975 album Cry To Me (of which we feature the gorgeous title track) was outstanding. But before Holloway could establish itself herself, her label went bust. She went on to the Salsoul label where she had dance hits with songs like “Love Sensation”, “Crash Goes Love” and “Hit And Run” (and a big soul hit in 1978 with Bunny Sigler’s “Only You”), and sang on dance classics like Dan Hartman’s “Re-Light My Fire”.

In 1991 she topped the US pop charts with Markie Mark and the Funky Bunch’s “Good Vibrations” – which featured, fully credited, vocals from “Love Sensation”.

Loleatta Holloway died on 21 March of heart failure at the age of 64.

In Memoriam: Cesaria Evora

Cesaria Evora: Sodade

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The Cape Verde Islands are a chain of ten volcanic islands off the coast of Senegal. Much of the land is desert, there is a live volcano on one island, and the area has a particular kind of hurricane named after it. So it really isn’t that surprising that the islands were uninhabited until the fifteenth century. At that time, Portugal established an outpost there to service their slave trade. The Cape Verde Islands remained a Portugese colony until independence came in 1975. Since the end of the slave trade, the country has been an important port in the Atlantic shipping lanes. As such, the people of Cape Verde come in frequent contact with people from many lands, and singing for the sailors is a viable way to make a living. It was what Cesaria Evora did for thirty years, starting in the 1950s.

In 1985, a friend took Evora to Paris. It was the first time she had ever left her homeland, and it led to the making of her first album three years later. Worldbeat was all the rage then in world music, and Evora’s first two albums set her singing against a backdrop of heavy electronic beats. Her third album, 1991’s Mar Azul, was the first to feature her voice in an acoustic setting like the one she had always used at home. The album would prove to be her breakthrough.

Evora’s style is called Morna. The instrumental part of the music features Portugese rhythms, but influences from jazz, west African music, and all of the cultures that have passed through Cape Verde are in the mix as well. But the feature of this music is the voice. Evora sang of history, of love, of course, and of justice for poor people like she had been. Evora insisted on performing bearfoot, in solidarity with the poor. In her voice, you can hear a land buffeted by the whims of nature, but also the determination of her people. Her words are in Kriola, the native creole version of Portugese. Not many people know the language, but her meaning is completely clear. Morna is first of all music of the heart, and no one who sang it had more heart than Cesaria Evora.

In Memoriam: Kent Morrill

The Wailers: Tall Cool One

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The Wailers: I Want To Walk With You

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The Fabulous Wailers were the Zeligs of the Northwest Rock 'n' Roll scene. They were still Tacoma high school kids when they formed in 1959, the same year as another Tacoma band, The Ventures. The Wailers hit it big first, playing their top 40 instrumental "Tall Cool One" on American Bandstand. Then in 1960, with vocalist Rockin' Robin Roberts,  they recorded an obscure R&B tune called "Louie Louie" which became a regional smash. Alas, it was the Portland-based Kingsmen who scored a nationwide hit with their sloppy copy-cat version based on The Wailers arrangement. With "Out of Our Tree", available on the Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era compilation , The Wailers introduced the punk rock sound to the Northwest, inspiring The Sonics, and Paul Revere and the Raiders. Among the band's early fans: Jimi Hendrix, who offered to lend the Wailers an amp if they'd let him on stage to play with the band. ( It never happened).

When Beatlemania swept through the country, The Wailers brought their secret weapon to the fore: keyboardist Kent Morrill's voice. Listen to "I Want To Walk With You" from the 1966 album Outburst! and you'll hear a voice every bit as good as those of the lead singers of The Byrds and The Turtles. It should come as no surprise that when The Wailers finally broke up, Kent found success as a Roy Orbison tribute artist.

He was reminding his wife of an upcoming tribute show the April week he passed away at the age of 70, after years of battling cancer.

 The legendary Seattle DJ Pat O'Day said "Fame of all kind is 75 percent talent and 25 percent luck. Kent had all the talent, all of the skills, all of the emotion, all of the writing ability to be a big star. The fact that he didn't become one was just a case of luck...We don't have to cry for his disappointments because he knew how good he was and that's what counts."

In Memoriam: Matt Jones

 Matt Jones: Ballad of Medgar Evers
 [purchase]

The civil rights movement peaked during my childhood. I vaguely remember reading about it in the newspapers and seeing things on TV, and I remember hearing that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. On my mother’s birthday. Of course, growing up in the 70’s in a liberal suburban New York family, the civil rights movement was always there, always something that I was aware of, but not something that directly affected my life.

Fast forward to about 10 years ago. My wife and kids and I are living in a small village on the Hudson River, and we get invited to a “music party” at a neighbor’s beautiful brick house. The owners lived in Manhattan and used this house on the weekends. We were told that they had friends who were folk singers, and that we should come, bring a bottle of wine and be prepared to sing, if we wanted to.

Over the next few years, my wife and kids and I attended a few of these parties. There was a rotating group of singers and musicians—playing guitars, mandolins, banjos, concertinas—and singing old labor songs, anti-Vietnam War songs, Civil Rights songs, as well as classic and modern folk songs, and original compositions.

It was an amazing experience. The clear leaders of group were two brothers, Matt and Marshall Jones. Using the power of the Internet, I learned that they were true heroes of the Civil Rights movement—members of the SNCC Freedom Singers and participants in many of the famous marches and demonstrations. Being in the same room as them made me feel a connection to something that I had only previously read about, and hearing them sing songs that they probably played at demonstrations gave me chills. I was also glad that my children, who have grown up in a multicultural community where the legacy of the Sixties is, often, taken for granted, got a chance to get a personal connection to some of the people who put their comfort and safety on the line and fought for equality and peace. Matt Jones once said “I don’t think of myself as a cultural worker, I am a freedom singer; a freedom fighter. I’ve always been a freedom fighter; I’ll probably go down that way, too.”

A few years ago, one of the hosts had a stroke, and the parties ended. Earlier this year, I read that Matt Jones had died. I haven’t seen his name on any lists of musicians who died this year, and maybe that would be OK with him, but he left an amazing legacy. Listen to his Ballad of Medgar Evers, sung by the SNCC Freedom Singers, a tribute to the civil rights leader who was assassinated by a KKK leader in 1963.

Guest Post by J David

In Memoriam: Hazel Dickens

Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard: Who's That Knocking

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Hazel Dickens: Only A Hobo
Hazel Dickens: Hills of Home

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Raised in and ultimately hailed as the authentic voice of the West Virginia mountains, born into poverty and a factory-worker until she was discovered by Mike Seeger in the early sixties, early bluegrass trailblazer and singer-songwriter Hazel Dickens channeled the pain and hardship of coal country and holler culture into a wailing plea for social and economic justice - first alongside classically trained partner (and Seeger's spouse) Alice Gerrard, where they were arguably the first true female bluegrass tenor-and-lead harmony duo on the circuit; later as a solo act and collaborator.

Their arrangements of classic bluegrass and appalachian tunes would become standard in the country music world, with coverage by Emmylou and others. Hazel's stature would ultimately win her several major industry achievement awards, and a National Heritage Fellowship from the NEA. And later, Hazel's originals, such as Coal Tattoo and union song They'll Never Keep Us Down, would find no small placement in a myriad of documentary soundtracks about the region and its woes, giving her influence enough to merit major coverage in the NYT upon her passage at 75 due to complications from pneumonia.

I didn't know much about Hazel until this year myself, having only started digging into older bluegrass in the past few years. But these three tracks - the first from Hazel and Alice's early years as pioneering women of bluegrass, via a prescient Art Decade post in January and recorded with sidemen Lamar Grier, Chubby Wise, David Grisman, and Billy Baker, the second a track from a 1987 solo album snagged as part of a 70-song set of Dylan covers in honor of his birthday this year over at Boogie Woogie Flu, posted just a month after her passing, the third another track from that album I fell in love with after tracking it down - show both evolution and common conviction, saying more in song that I could in words.

Holiday Classics: Blue Christmas

Leon Redbone: Blue Christmas

[purchase]

Blue Christmas provides the template for the holiday heartbreak song. Usually, the emotion gets heaped on, with big string sections, cloying background vocals, and a lead vocal performance that milks the song for every ounce of emotion it contains and then some. Elvis Presley’s version of Blue Christmas is exactly the sort of thing I mean, but the song is treated this way by almost everyone who records it. There are some odd counter-examples that set the song against a sterile techno backdrop, with a passionless vocal up front. But Leon Redbone shows in his version what can be done with the song by taking it at face value. The emotions here are real, not pumped up to theatrical proportions. The heartbreak is presented honestly, not glossed over or denied. I always hated the song until I heard this version. To me, Redbone finds the essence that so eludes others, and delivers a fine performance.