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Music/Film: The Black Keys - Live From Abbey Road

Check out the Sundance Channel's series "Live From Abbey Road" Thursdays at 10 PM. Above is a clip of The Black Keys' episode. The show is described on the Sundance Channel site as follows: "The world's most famous recording studio is the setting for this intimate music series featuring new and established performers. Created to suggest the visual quality of a movie and the carefully engineered sound of a commercial recording, LIVE FROM ABBEY ROAD captures artists without an audience as they rehearse, discuss and perform in the closed environment of a recording studio."

They've got another series that looks good as well. "Architecture School. Focusing on an innovative studio program at Tulane University, this six-part documentary series follows a group of fourth- and fifth-year architecture students as they design and build a single-family house in a low-income neighborhood of New Orleans devastated by Hurricane Katrina." Episode 1 is airing on August 20th at 9 PM.

The Black Keys are also featured on MTV2's "The Drop" today. Now go outside, and tell the world! I'm envious of all you lucky folks who are goin' to see 'em in Toledo tonight!

Posted in Music, Film

Tags: southern, southern rock, electric blues, southern blues, new orleans, the black keys, mtv2, sundance channel, architecture school, live from abbey road, the drop, hurricane katrina rebuilding efforts,

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Music: Happy Birthday Muddy Waters

The above clip is Muddy Waters circa 1966 performing Got My Mojo Workin'.

According to Wikipedia, McKinley Morganfield (April 4, 1913 – April 30, 1983), better known as Muddy Waters, was an American blues musician and is generally considered "the Father of Chicago blues". He is also the actual father of blues musicians Big Bill Morganfield and Larry 'Muddy Junior' Williams.

Waters was born in Issaquena County, Mississippi in 1913. His grandmother Della Grant raised him after his mother died in 1918. His fondness for playing in mud earned him his nickname at an early age. Waters started out on harmonica but by age seventeen he was playing the guitar at parties and fish fries, emulating two blues artists who were extremely popular in the south, Son House and Robert Johnson. "His thick heavy voice, the dark coloration of his tone and his firm almost solid personality were all clearly derived from House," wrote Peter Guralnick in Feel Like Going Home, "but the embellishments which he added, the imaginative slide technique and more agile rhythms, were closer to Johnson."

In 1940 Waters moved to St. Louis before playing with Silas Green a year later and returning back to Mississippi. In the early part of the decade he ran a juke joint, complete with gambling, moonshine, a jukebox and live music courtesy of Muddy himself. In the Summer of 1941 Alan Lomax came to Stovall, Mississippi, on behalf of the Library of Congress to record various country blues musicians. "He brought his stuff down and recorded me right in my house," Waters recalled in Rolling Stone, "and when he played back the first song I sounded just like anybody's records. Man, you don't know how I felt that Saturday afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice. Later on he sent me two copies of the pressing and a check for twenty bucks, and I carried that record up to the corner and put it on the jukebox. Just played it and played it and said, `I can do it, I can do it.'"
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Check this out:

Muddy Waters - Got My Mojo Working: Rare Performances 1968-1978 (2000) DVD

Posted in Music

Tags: blues, american music, americana, slide guitar, southern blues, muddy waters, american history, ,

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Film: Born for Hard Luck: Peg Leg Sam Jackson

This clip is from a film by Tom Davenport. It's a portrait of Arthur "Peg Leg Sam" Jackson - a harmonica player, singer, and comedian who made his living "busking" on the street and touring southern towns. Between the Civil War and World War II, many such gifted and restless young black musicians found careers in the traveling patent-medicine shows, a favorite entertainment in the rural and small-town South. They sang and recited comic routines and danced to attract a crowd for the pitchman and his sales of wonder-cure "snake oil." Born for Hard Luck includes highlights from Peg Leg Sam's performance at a North Carolina county fair in 1972, the only film record of a live medicine show and material filmed near his home in South Carolina in 1975. It gives excerpts from his comic routines, a mock chanted sermon, "toasts," folktales, three "buck dances," and his brilliant harmonica playing and singing of "Reuben Train," "Greasy Greens," "Hand Me Down," "Who Left My Backdoor Running," and "Froggie Went A-Courting." You can stream the entire film at www.folkstreams.net or the DVD's available from Davenport Films. Check out the Folkstreams.net site for some great stuff on making the film and about Peg Leg Sam.

"You look at me, you look at a man that was born for hard luck. I was born on the thirteenth day, odd day, on Friday, on a bad luck day. To show you that I is in hard luck, if I go up the street walking fast, I run over something. I'm in such hard luck, if I go up there walking slow, something run over me. I'm in such hard luck, if I'm sitting down I'm in everybody's way. I'm in such hard luck, if it's raining down soup at this very minute, everybody'd be standing there with a spoon--why, I'd have a fork. Yes sir, I was born for hard luck!" - Peg Leg Sam

Here's a bit from folkstreams.net about Peg Leg Sam:

Arthur Jackson was born on a farm near Jonesville, S.C., in 1911, and grew up sharing a one-room log cabin with his parents and 5 brothers and sisters. His father worked him so hard as a child that he was glad when a rainy day came. "I went to a school when it rained, " he says. "Outside of that I always had something to do on the farm....If I'd a-stayed at home I wouldn't have known a thing, wouldn't have been able to do anything but plow a mule. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. I did a lot of work in vain--sixteen hours in June, July, August, working from sun to sun. If you plow a mule all day and into the night, you feel just as tired when you get up as when you lay down. Plow all night too, dreaming."

At the age of 10 Jackson started running away from home. "Arthur would be out in the field plowing a mule, working in the hot sun," a neighbor recalls. "All of a sudden that mule's ears would prick up in the air, " and Arthur would stop to listen. Soon you would hear a freight train several miles away, coming in our direction. That'd be the end of his plowing. He'd leave the mule standing in the row and run off to catch that train. You might not see him again for months."

He hoboed into Canada and New England in the summers and toward California and Florida when the weather turned cold, doing odd jobs--digging potatoes in Maine, cutting cane in Florida, preaching in Maryland, working on a boat in the Caribbean, serving time in a reform school and on a Georgia prison farm, and intermittently settling down for brief flings at marriage. In 1930, hungry and half asleep from days of hoboing, he lost a leg when he fell from a freight train near Raleigh, N.C. "That's when I started playing the harp good, "he says,"--making something of it."
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