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Tuesday, March 28, 2006
GOOD ROCKIN' TONIGHT
Wynonie Harris
King 78 : 1948
Available on: Bloodshot Eyes: The Best of Wynonie Harris
Rhino : 1994
[Buy It]
I HEARD THE NEWS (JESUS IS COMING AGAIN)
Wynona Carr
Specialty 78 : 1949
Available on: Dragnet For Jesus
Specialty : 1995
[Buy It]
SAVIOUR PASS ME NOT
The Swan Silvertones
Saviour Pass Me Not
VeeJay : 1962
Available on: The Swan Silvertones/Saviour Pass Me Not
Collectables : 2001
[Inexplicably Unavailable]
CAN'T STAY AWAY
Don Covay
Mercy!
Atlantic : 1965
Available on: Mercy/See-Saw
Koch : 2000
[Buy It]
MEAN OLD WORLD
Sam Cooke & The Soul Stirrers
Specialty : 1957
Available on: Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers
Specialty : 1991
[Buy It]
MEAN OLD WORLD
Sam Cooke, w/out the Soul Stirrers
Night Beat
RCA : 1963
[Buy It]
ALABAMA
J.B. Lenoir
L & R : 1965
Available on: Vietnam Blues
Evidence : 1995
[Buy It]
for Heather, because ask and ye shall receive-Interviewer: How do you sing?
Aretha Franklin: Religiously.
Interviewer: What sort of gospel?
Franklin: My father's gospel.
Interviewer: Which father?
Franklin: Both fathers.
-Quoted in Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music Ok, folks, my book's due - overdue - really overdue - really, really overdue - so in lieu of fresh posts, a very small fragment of the manuscript, at a tiny fraction of the retail price. There are a few steps missing, but dedicated MW readers should see how the threads I'm picking at bellow might eventually tie into the songs I've posted above. Or not, in which case I am deeply, deeply f-u-c-k-e-d. Also - entirely unrelated - does anyone happen to have a recording of Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings covering "I Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Was In"? If so, would you be so good as to send it along? Danke.
XI.
During the giddy, post-depression years, swing bands played old ballrooms with old, mahogany floors. On Saturday nights, when the house was packed and rocking, those floors would buckle under the weight, give a good eight inches, and toss dancers into the air like a trampoline.
But in 1941, bands began losing musicians to the draft: In Europe, the 28th Infantry Division Band lost 44 of its 60 members at the Battle of the Bulge. Musicians belonging to the 82nd Airborne Band held the line against infantry and Panzer divisions in the Ardennes, and in 1944, Glenn Miller was shot dow - friendly fire - over France. Stateside, jukebox factories and record pressing plants were requisitioned for the war effort, midnight curfews and a 20% entertainment tax closed the dance halls, and gas rationing and tire shortages forced touring bands off the road. Shellac shortages led the three major record companies, which had a near monopoly on the market, to focus on white artists, and in 1942, the head of the American Federation of Musicians called a recording ban which prevented even the white bands from pressing new material.
Not bound to the union, vocalists and a cappella groups rushed in to fill the void, and the record store racks filled with torch ballads and novelty tunes. This was not music meant for dancing - it was music meant for pining, and as the fighting progressed, the Hit Parade became a gauge of wartime fears and frustrations: "My Devotion" and "Somebody Else is Taking My Place" comforted war brides and disturbed doughboys (and vice versa), in 1942. "As Time Goes By" and "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To" topped the charts in 1943, and the following year brought "I Dream of You," "I'll Get By," "I'm Making Believe," and "I'll Be Home for Christmas." By the war's end, Tin Pan Alley had supplanted jazz in the public imagination, and jazz itself had split in two.
In the early 1940s, Dizzy Gillespie had joined Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clark, Charlie Christian, and other big-band players in small club dates and after-hour jam sessions. There, they fired up the music's tempos, inverted stock chord changes, and emerged with a new, modern jazz. "The boppers worked out a music that was hard to steal," pianist Mary Lou Williams said, and at first there was little incentive to; not only because the music was fast, and fantastically difficult to play, but because it was almost impossible to dance to (something of a moot point, since the new clubs tended to discourage those who tried). "Jazz had gotten so cool, we lost the kids who wanted to dance," Lionel Hampton wrote in his autobiography. "So we started playing this real gutty jazz, and people called it rhythm and blues."
The great modern-jazz drummers - Clark, Max Roach, and Art Blakey - had accented off-beats on the hi-hat, ride, and crash cymbals, creating sharp, melodic rhythm patterns that cut against the grain of the horn lines. Hampton simply flipped his sticks around and stomped a heavy backbeat out with the thick ends. Charlie Parker had stood motionless on the stage, eyes closed in concentration, pulling sinuous melodies out of the most familiar chord progressions. Hampton's saxophonist, Illinois Jacquet, ripped off his jacket, fell to the floor, lay on his back, and let loose a series of simple, screeching one-note phrases. Modern Jazz was supple and sophisticated - a self-conscious art music. Rhythm and blues was earthy and danceable; it harkened back to the blues shout, the barrelhouse, and, especially, the music of black sanctified church.
"I was brought up in the Holiness church," Hampton explained. "I'd always try to sit next to the sister with the big bass drum. Our church had a whole band, with guitar, trombone and different drums. That sister on the bass drum would get happy and get up and start dancing up and down the aisles, and I'd get on her drum: boom! boom! I always had that beat in me. That heavy backbeat is pure sanctified, Church of God in Christ."Labels: alex, rock and roll = gospel music
posted by Alex
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