After yesterday’s post about black singers in country music, I decided to get away from the computer and chill with some more Ray Charles. I went to the stack o’ vinyl, took out the LP, What’d I Say (pictured right), and hunkered down with the back cover liner notes. I was only to the third […]
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“I am not a blues singer, I am not a jazz singer, I am not a country and western singer. But, I am a singer that sings rhythm and blues, I am a singer that can sing country music, I am a singer that can sing jazz. There’s a big difference.” -–Ray Charles, in […]
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Texas Rock For Country Rollers was the first Doug Sahm album I ever bought. 1992 at Melody Records in Chico, CA. Found an old vinyl cut-out that looked like it might’ve been used to chamois a ’74 Pinto. That was the bad news. The good news is that the record itself was in fine condition. […]
Read MoreGot turned onto this the other day. It’s a short film inspired by and featuring music from Levon Helm‘s 2007 album, Dirt Farmer. The music is uniformly excellent — big surprise there — but the film itself is a poignant snapshot of life in one desperate corner of rural America. In that sense, I’d say […]
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Does the singer catch the song or does the song catch the singer? Blind Lemon Jefferson, writer of “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” hit with the tune on separate recordings in 1927 and 1928, but was dead of unknown causes by 1929. I like to think that maybe the song was trying to […]
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