Yeah @tomic601, Albert’s hands and fingers were huge, and he was very strong. I’ve never seen anyone bend strings like that (the high E string bent all the way to the top of the fretboard of his Flying V!), and he did it in a real relaxed, "no hurry" kind of way, unrushed. His tone was SO thick, like a big ol’ hit off a spliff of real good weed, the kind we San Jose kids found only in San Francisco. Only schwag made it to the suburbs ;-) .
Fate? Karma? Purgatory? Help me put a good spin on this.
My wife and I are heading out to Clarksdale, Mississippi for the Juke Joint Festival which is primarily a blues festival for local delta and hill country blues acts. It is a ton of fun.
We are staying with some old friends in a nearby town. They have graciously invited us to a music series hosted by local country music singer and songwriter Steve Azar. The event occurs every couple of months and features a meal by a prominent local chef (featured in Southern Living, Garden and Gun, etc) as well as cocktails and a casual performance and interview with other songwriters and musicians. It is a small group and the guests interact with the guest musicians. The tickets are fairly pricey and our friends have insisted on buying our tickets.
Other than their love of country music our musical tastes are similar to our friend's. They are going with us to the blues festival. They are also into Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, etc.
The guest musician/songwriter is named Anthony Smith. I'd never heard of him. Apparently he has written songs for some big names in the country music world as has the host, Steve Azar.
Now, I don't hate country music per se. But I have a hard time with contemporary pop country. Here is a video of Anthony Smith's:
https://youtu.be/sbNVTh2QA7k
It is going to be a long night. Fortunately the music will be acoustic. Just the guest with his guitar. I suspect the food will be great and there will be plenty of booze. And I guess it will be interesting to get some insight into the singer/songwriter world even if it is pop country.
I just think it is funny that the one type of music I can hardly stand is what is being featured. I'd prefer hip-hop or rap to pop country ;-)
We are staying with some old friends in a nearby town. They have graciously invited us to a music series hosted by local country music singer and songwriter Steve Azar. The event occurs every couple of months and features a meal by a prominent local chef (featured in Southern Living, Garden and Gun, etc) as well as cocktails and a casual performance and interview with other songwriters and musicians. It is a small group and the guests interact with the guest musicians. The tickets are fairly pricey and our friends have insisted on buying our tickets.
Other than their love of country music our musical tastes are similar to our friend's. They are going with us to the blues festival. They are also into Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, etc.
The guest musician/songwriter is named Anthony Smith. I'd never heard of him. Apparently he has written songs for some big names in the country music world as has the host, Steve Azar.
Now, I don't hate country music per se. But I have a hard time with contemporary pop country. Here is a video of Anthony Smith's:
https://youtu.be/sbNVTh2QA7k
It is going to be a long night. Fortunately the music will be acoustic. Just the guest with his guitar. I suspect the food will be great and there will be plenty of booze. And I guess it will be interesting to get some insight into the singer/songwriter world even if it is pop country.
I just think it is funny that the one type of music I can hardly stand is what is being featured. I'd prefer hip-hop or rap to pop country ;-)
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n80, "I’ve never been in an actual juke joint."Those places still exist but they are not "Ground Zero" kind. I am resisting to go into details, but you have to know where to find them and you cannot go looking for them. Not as in some tourist sense "where locals go", but be one of them. As another poster mentioned, most are black and at times I felt I was the only white person who has ever set a foot there, but those were my people and fun was unimaginable. Of note, I even consider Junior Kimbrough’s place as somewhat touristy (before it burned down, of course). As it seems that you are from the area and being a decent person, I wish this conversation was going on way back when... |
@bdp24 : Speaking of thick fingered guitar playing, we saw this young man at the 2017 Juke Joint Festival. He was about 17 then. He was mesmerizing. We watched him play in an old bank building for close to two hours. He's played at the White House and been written up in Rolling Stone. Hard to believe those big fat hands can do what he does. Scroll forward to about 2:30 to see him let loose: https://youtu.be/FLQbQidC-Ks @glupson and @orpheus10 : Ground Zero is like a Disney version of a juke joint and that's most of what you find in that area now. I'm sure there are modern versions of juke joints out there now....there are some where I live. But they don't play blues. Mostly 'DJs' 'playing' hip hop etc. Anyway, I suspect if I had been an adult and was into the blues in the mid 1960s I would not have had the nerve to go into a typical juke joint. It would have been my loss of course. But things were very different back then. My mother was a school teacher in 1966 or so and she had a black girl in her class who was one of the first black children to go to a white public school in Mississippi, or at least in Coahoma County anyway. She said it all went smoothly, which was not always the case of course. |
Robbie Robertson has repeated this story Levon Helm recounted in his autobiography, the Robertson telling of the story viewable on You Tube: In the Summer of ’65, The Hawks had a week off (they were a working band, playing on the circuit in the South, Midwest, and up and down the East Coast), so the four Canadians suggested they go to Levon’s hometown in Arkansas, Helena, to look up fellow Helenian Sonny Boy Williamson. Levon had gone down to the local radio station in the afternoon after high school got out for the day, watching and listening to Sonny Boy and his band perform live in the studio. The Hawks found Sonny Boy walking down a street in Helena, and suggested they go somewhere to get a drink. He took them to the home of a woman who ran a booze & barbeque joint in her living room, where he and they spent a few hours getting drunk and playing music. Sonny Boy told them that he had just returned from a tour of the UK (where the Blues Revival was already in full bloom, a couple of years before it flowered in the U.S., though The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, with Mike Bloomfield on guitar, were already making their first Elektra album), and said the backing bands he had been provided with by the promoter (one of which was The Yardbirds, with a very young Eric Clapton on guitar) "wanted to play the Blues SO bad, and that’s just how they play it" ;-) . SBW and The Hawks made tentative plans to hit the road together in the U.S., but he passed away before that could happened. Bob Dylan hired them later that year, and took The Hawks with him on his UK tour in the Fall. In the audience on that tour were The Beatles, The Stones, and all the other UK bands, getting shown what a really good (heh) band sounds like. |
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