Arnold Dolmetsch – A Pioneer of Early Music

May 26th, 2009

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To Hear Your Banjo Play – 1947

May 25th, 2009

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Rowan Atkinson – Not The Nine o’Clock News

May 11th, 2009

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Maybelle Carter Lauded as a ‘True Trailblazer’

May 8th, 2009

Sunday marks what would have been the 100th birthday for a woman whose talents earned her the title of “the queen mother of country music.” Born May 10, 1909, to parents Hugh and Margaret just outside Nickelsville, Maybelle Addington — better known to music fans as “Mother” Maybelle Carter — would go on to become one of the most important and influential guitar players in American music history. A largely self-taught player who grew up in a musical family, Carter grabbed the attention of generations of country guitarists playing her trademark style — known as the “Carter scratch” — on her 1928 Gibson L-5 archtop acoustic guitar. She first made her name with her brother-in-law A.P. Carter and cousin Sarah Carter as part of the Carter Family beginning in the late 1920s. After A.P. and Sara retired, Maybelle continued on in Nashville, this time with her daughters — June, Helen and Anita — as “Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters” until she died in 1978.

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Blues Capitalist

May 7th, 2009

If Beale Street could talk, it would say, “Who the hell is the guy depicted in that big statue by the entrance to the park?” W. C. Handy, once so famous as “the Father of the Blues” that he was memorialized with a bronze monument in Memphis, is not nearly as well known today to people who are not either music scholars or copyright lawyers. It has been 35 years since James Baldwin paid tribute to Handy by employing a phrase from his “Beale Street Blues” as the title of a novel, and it has been almost as long since Joni Mitchell addressed Handy directly in her song about Beale Street, “Furry Sings the Blues.” Even then, what Mitchell sang was, “W. C. Handy, I’m rich and I’m fey / And I’m not familiar with what you played.”

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Cakewalk

April 23rd, 2009

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The Ballad of Blind Tom, Slave Pianist

April 20th, 2009

This book tells the story of a figure who is all but forgotten today, but who achieved great success in his own lifetime. Blind Tom was born a slave in Georgia in 1849, and this already undesirable condition was compounded by the fact that he was blind from birth. But he was more fortunate than many who were born into slavery but unable to carry out the work of slaves: blind or handicapped babies were often abandoned and left to die, or even killed. While Tom’s master was not sympathetic, he was not this cruel, and instead sold Tom and both of his parents. They were lucky enough not to be separated; they were purchased out of pity by James Bethune, who occupied a rather odd moral position, being both a proponent of slavery and a champion of human rights.

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Is There Too Much Music?

April 9th, 2009

Have you ever wondered if there might be too much music? A couple of weeks ago I attended South By South West music festival in Austin, Texas, where more than 2,000 up-and-coming bands, singer-songwriters and other musical performers played in just four days. Standing on the street at an intersection of venues where at least a dozen bands were playing at the same time, I was immersed in a kind of sonic cloud of formless music, an ambient hum of rock and roll. And it occurred to me that this was just an amplified version of the soundtrack of modern life, the endless din of music we are subjected to: the boom of car stereos, shop Muzak, advertising jingles, computer games, TV and film soundtracks and the tinny racket bleeding from personal stereo headphones. Shakespeare famously wrote, “If music be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it”. We seem to be taking him literally. Music is everywhere. It is as if the more it becomes available, the more voracious we become in our consumption of it.

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The Music Man

April 5th, 2009

W.C. Handy didn’t live in St. Louis for long, but the period stayed with him because he was so poor that he sometimes had to sleep on cobblestone levees along the Mississippi River. This was in winter, hence the haunting first line of his most famous song: “I hate to see that evening sun go down.” Handy later moved to Memphis, where in addition to “St. Louis Blues,” he composed “Beale Street Blues,” “Yellow Dog Blues” and many other songs that became hits in versions by such great musicians as Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. According to biographer David Roberts, the young Handy had intended to be “the colored Sousa”: a counterpart to the renowned composer of marches. But when Handy heard what we now know of as Mississippi Delta Blues, he changed his mind. “I saw the beauty of primitive music,” he recalled. “Their music wanted polishing, but it contained the essence. Folks would pay good money for it.” In giving the blues sophistication, Handy made the genre part of “mainstream American music” — and made himself a rich man.

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Buddy Guy & Son House

April 3rd, 2009

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