This Week's Show: Feb 25-28, 2011

 "Poor Boy, Long Way From Home"

---------from Poor Boy Blues by Willard "Ramblin' Thomas                                                            
                                                                                  

This week Spinning Tales will focus on the itinerant blues musicians who spent much of their lives wandering; playing on the streets and in the juke joints of the rural south, traveling to play for the emerging African American communities of the urban north, and then at one point walking into a recording "studio"--sometimes not much more than a makeshift set-up in a rented hotel room--where the magic of technology allowed their music to continue the journey to be enjoyed by us today.

Traveling as solo songsters, or as members of the ever shifting personnel of minstrel shows or string bands, often mastering the popular songs of the day to appeal to white audiences, these musicians weren't the only people on the road in the early part of the 20th century.

From about 1910 into the years of the Depression, the Great Migration saw an estimated 2 million African Americans leave the south to escape racism and seek employment in the growing industrial cities of the mid west, northeast and west.  The blues followed along.

This Week's Show: February 18, 2011

Robert Johnson: "The Man, the Myth, the Music!"

When Michael decided to focus in on Robert Johnson this week, asserting in his email that "NO blues show, that's right NO blues show, can NOT do a show on Robert Johnson", I grinned, nodded enthusiastically, and immediately created a title for this week's web posting: Robert Johnson: "The Man, the Myth, the Music."--and set about to do "just a little bit" of research. I thought, "Heck,  I should  be able to shed a little light on the subject, separate the man from the myth, etc."

What was I thinking? 

The cast of characters involved in those early years of recorded blues in the late 1920's and early '30's, the legion of apocryphal stories surrounding the bluesmen who sometimes played and drank together; who sometimes collaborated, sometimes squabbled;  who sometimes borrowed, covered--or stole--one another's songs in those days includes other blues icons like

This Week's Show: February 11, 2011

Bo Carter

Over a month ago, Spinning Tales proclaimed we'd have the blues all winter long.  With two feet or more of snow adorning the fields here in western Massachusetts, it's obvious we've got a lot more blues to play.

This week we'll start with 4 cuts from Columbia's Roots 'n' Blues, Retrospective 1925-1950 featuring Tom Darby and Jimmie Tarlton, Whistlin' Alex Moore, Bo Carter, and Lonnie Johnson. We'll then continue on with a few by blues guitarist Bukka White on the Arhoolie label and more by Lonnie Johnson, sometimes considered the father of jazz guitar, on Smithsonian Folkways.  (This week's first story will actually be a tale by Bukka White!)

We'll then focus in for a bit on Son House, who is often considered to be one the true masters of blues guitar. We'll hear a couple of his songs, then listen to interpretations of those same songs by contemporary blueswoman Rory Block from her 1988 CD "Blues Walking Like a Man: A Tribute to Son House"

This Week's Show: February 4, 2011

""What Exactly--or Inexactly--is the Blues?"
 

Frank Hutchison

For the past two weeks Spinning Tales has featured the blues as played by white artists ranging from the earliest days of recorded music through the decades to some contemporary musicians.  Along 
the way the two of us have sometimes wondered if a certain cut qualifies as "the Blues".  Maybe some folks out there thought that we'd not drawn the line crisply enough and let something that was not "The Blues" in through the backdoor. Was some of this merely Blues Lite?

So for this week's show, Lance threw the above question into the hopper at a great on-line site, The Blindman's Blues Forum.  Of course, the old-timers there must of rolled their eyes a bit.