Highway 61 Radio

This week’s radio show features an interview with British blues and country music scholar Tony Russell, who visited Oxford back in February. The main topic is of early white performers of blues, such as Jimmie Rodgers, Darby and Tarlton, Frank Hutchinson, and Jimmie Davis.

In the early ’70s Tony wrote the paperback Blacks, Whites and Blues, which was very influential in terms of highlighting the similarities in the repertoires and the cross influences of early African American and white rural musicians in the South. About five years ago the book was reissued together with Paul Oliver’s book Savannah Syncopators (on the African roots of blues) and John Goodrich and Robert Dixon’s book Recording the Blues in the volume Yonder Comes the Blues.

In the early ’70s Tony also founded the magazine Old Time Music, which became the authoritative source on old time country. Many of the profiles he wrote for the magazine were recently republished in the volume Country Music Originals. Tony and fellow British blues scholar Chris Smith were also the primary authors of the recent book Penguin Guide to Blues Recordings, which contains biographies of a wide range of blues artists from the beginning of the recording era to thepresent and summaries of thousands of albums.

I’ve had the fortune to meet Tony on numerous occasions, including in London and at the unveiling of the first Mississippi Blues Trail marker in Holly Ridge at the site of Charley Patton’s burial place. This year I had the honor (thanks to Mary Katherine Aldin!) of sitting on a panel at the Folk Alliance in Memphis on the topic of “Blacks, Whites and Blues” with Tony, Tom Freeland, and Henrique Prince, the violinist and vocalist of the African American string band the Ebony Hillbillies. As you’ll hear on the show, Tony is very eloquent on the topic and a hell of a nice guy.

From left: Living Blues cofounder Jim O'Neal, Dr. David Evans, George Mitchell, Dr. Sy Oliver and Art Rosenbaum at the Blues Today conference panel on field recording

Although this is nominally a blog for the Highway 61 radio show that I host, I realize that I haven’t been spending a lot of space here actually discussing or promoting the show — I’m usually having too much fun following other blues news. This Saturday we’ll air a show that co-producer Eric Feldman and I put together yesterday on blues songs featuring the fiddle, ranging from early recordings of the Mississippi Sheiks up through the post-modern blues of guitarist James Blood Ulmer and his band.

The latest show to be uploaded on our podcast (and broadcast last Saturday over MPB) features an interview I conducted with folklorist George Mitchell last year in Atlanta that features recordings George made of artists including Furry Lewis, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and R.L. Burnside (who George was the first to record). George’s story is pretty amazing and he’s a captivating storyteller. It looks like there’s about sixty shows uploaded on the podcast now–if you haven’t signed up it’s a pretty easy and free process. All you need is the iTunes player and an internet connection.

George was one of our guests last week at the Blues Today conference in Oxford, and I also had the pleasure of interviewing him on Thacker Mountain Radio at the Lyric Theater last Thursday. Later that evening Highway 61 sponsored a blues party at the Powerhouse, which is a wonderful facility for holding events. Thanks so much to executive director Wayne Andrews of the Powerhouse for provision of the space and to the Southern Foodways Alliance and the Lazy Magnolia Brewery for donating refreshments. Carol Mockbee and Coulter Fussell did a wonderful job in promoting the evening’s events, and thanks to Joe York, Mark Camarigg and Rebecca Batey for manning the bars.

The Powerhouse party was very laid-back and featured performances by George on his homemade bass, which he learned to construct from Memphis musicians back in the ’60s. Also performing were fellow conference attendees David Evans and Art Rosenbaum, as well as local Jake Fussell, who has known George and Art since his childhood. My folks are great, but it sure would have been fun to have grown up in Jake’s household — his father Fred is a folklorist who specializes in material culture and recently created the Ma Rainey museum in Columbus, and his mother Cathy runs the Carson McCullers Center For Writers and Musicians in Columbus (they’re sponsoring a McCullers film festival on March 27-29).

Fred and Cathy followed the Georgia contingent of Mitchell and Art and Margo Rosenbaum up to Oxford, as did Lance and April Ledbetter of the Dust-to-Digital label, which just won a Grammy award for its box set of Art’s fieldwork, The Art of Field Recording, and recently released a follow-up boxed set. Thanks to Lance for agreeing to join my panel on labels at the last minute!

George Mitchell, Jake Fussell and Art Rosenbaum performing at the Powerhouse

This past Saturday’s show featured drummer Earl Palmer. About three weeks ago I posted on Palmer’s death–you can go to the post by clicking here.

This Friday Senators Barack Obama and John McCain arrive here in Oxford for the first of the three presidential debates. The university has been hopping with activities for the past month, and a couple weeks back Greg Johnson, the Blues Archive’s archivist, and I presented a brown bag talk on the topic of “Presidents and the blues” to an amazingly large crowd (for brown bags, that is) at the Ole Miss library. Last Saturday’s Highway 61 featured many of the songs that Greg and I sampled at the talk, which we divided into the themes of “Tributes,” “Direct Appeals,” “Critiques” and “If I was President.” Greg created a page on the library server that lists some of the Blues Archive’s president-related holdings.

Many of the songs played at the talk and on the show came from CDs that Guido van Rijn issued in tandem with the release of his books “Roosevelt’s Blues,” “The Truman and Eisenhower Blues,” and “Kennedy’s Blues.” The books have contributed greatly to our understanding of the relationship of blues and politics, as van Rijn has carefully gone through the body of blues recordings to identity all of the songs that have explicit political commentary. It’s a lot more than most people would assume–although most blues are of the “my baby left me variety” there are quite a few that address wars, governmental programs and political fantasies, such as Louisiana Red’s “Red’s Dream.”

Some of the most moving political songs were tributes for Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, who of course had great appeal to African Americans. One of the most interesting tribute songs was “That’s Why I Like Roosevelt,” which has been performed by a number of artists, including Otis Jackson and Rev. Willie Eason. I found the following “video” of Jackson’s version on youtube. I don’t know quite what to think about the animation, but the audio is good quality.

One of the most explicitly political of all blues artists was Josh White, who initially recorded blues and gospel for the “race” market but fell into bohemian circles in the late ’30s when he was asked to perform in a play in New York City. He soon became a darling of the leftist folk scene and a created a very successful cabaret act. In his second career White didn’t have to worry about the marketplace censorship that ruled over the “race” records market, and was rewarded by audiences for his more explicitly political songs. Here’s a video of White appealing to “Uncle Sam”

Whereas Josh White’s later music was largely directed at the folk crowd, J.B. Lenoir’s was largely aimed at the R&B market. In the early ’50s his “Eisenhower Blues” was one of the few political songs that directly addressed a president in a negative fashion; complaints led to his label, Chess, reissuing the song under another name. There’s rumors that the government stepped in to ban the song–I’d guess that the censorship was the result of the more benign–but no less effective–pressure from distributors who didn’t want to be associated with controversial products.

The CD "Vietnam Blues" on Evidence collects Lenoir's political songs from the '60s

In the 1960s Lenoir recorded some of the most explicitly political blues ever put to wax, but the music was not released in the United States for many years. His two acoustic albums for the German L&R label contained songs with titles like “Shot on James Meredith,” “Alabama Bus,” and “Born Dead.” The most famous of these songs is probably “Down in Mississippi,” an indictment of Lenoir’s home state–he was born in Monticello.

It’s been covered by a number of artists, including Jim Dickinson, who performed the song in the very conservative environment of Neshoba County Fair recently as part of a traveling version of Thacker Mountain Radio. Here’s a version that Ry Cooder performed in the late ’80s with the Moula Banda Rhythm Aces, which included vocalists Terry Evans & Bobby King, drummer Jim Keltner and accordionist Flaco Jimenez. Filmed by the great Les Blank.

Following the death of President Kennedy blues researcher Pete Welding collected an album’s worth of tribute songs that he issued as “Can’t Keep From Crying: Topical Blues on the Death of President Kennedy” on his Testament label. (The wonderful record is available on Amazon marketplace for as little as $2.99–pick it up!). Since that era there’s been relative fewer president songs–one of the most memorable was Larry Shannon Hargrove’s “Leave Bill Clinton Alone“–but a number have popped up in tandem with the current election.

Bobby Rush recently recut Percy Mayfield’s “I Don’t Want to Be President” as “Bobby Rush for President,” New Orleans’ Mem Shannon just released an MP3 version of the song “Goodbye Mr. President–It’s Time For You to Go,” North Carolina’s Roy Roberts has an MP3 for sale of his “Obama For Change,” and Georgia’s Chick “The Stoop Down Man” Chick Willis recently recorded the song “Obama”. Youtube unfortunately took down a video of the song, but it’s available at Willis’ website.