LUKE JORDAN'S BIRTHDAY

Luke Jordan would have been 120 years old today. The beguiling Piedmont blues artist was born somewhere in Appomattox County, VA this day in 1892. This marker for him can be found in Lynchburg:

 

To listen to his 1927 'Church Bell Blues', referred to above, is to feel affected by the beauty of his voice and struck by the song's inclusion of a commonstock formula that Willie McTell was to "jump his way" and incorporate into his own 'Statesboro Blues' the year after. Here is that Luke Jordan track:

KILLING OFF MY BOB DYLAN BLOG

The day before yesterday I published my decision to call a halt to my blog BobDylanEncyclopedia.Blogspot. It was created almost six years ago, in March 2006

That said, I have no plans to kill off this blog  -  and I have also created a new blog, OUTTAKES. The latter can be accessed either here or from the drop-down menu cunningly titled 'Blogs' at www.michaelgray.net.

 

News of what I'm doing will also continue to be posted on my website and I can always be contacted directly by e-mail at michael@michaelgray.net.

happy christmas & new

year

TO ALL MY BLOG READERS

WITH KINDEST REGARDS

McTELL HELPS HAPPY TRAUM RETURN TO THE 12-STRING

 This interesting blog item by Happy Traum was posted way back in January but came to my attention only yesterday. It's always gratifying when a book influences a bona fide musician, and Happy Traum is certainly one. His post can be found here.

PETER NARVÁEZ

I have been very saddened to learn of the death, earlier this month, of folklorist, blues musician and cultural historian of Newfoundland, Peter Narváez. He died of lung cancer, aged 69, on November 11.

He was an important figure on the music scene, as this Globe and Mail obituary describes. He was also proud to be able to say that he had played music with Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Yank Rachell, Big Joe Williams, Bukka White, Victoria Spivey, Johnny Shines, Fred McDowell and others, and it was his resourceful recording of Skip James’ concert in Bloomington IN in March 1968 that was given official release in 1999.

He was also a good friend to innumerable people - in my case initially and especially in the mid-1980s when I spent three months in Newfoundland and got to know him almost immediately.

Peter introduced me to the several invaluable 1000-pages-each hardbacks Blues Lyric Poetry: A Concordance and Blues Lyric Poetry: An Anthology by Michael Taft - from which I came to realise how enormously Bob Dylan had drawn upon, and must have known inside-out, that great ocean of pre-war blues work. Without Peter’s guidance, the huge chapter on Dylan and the blues in my book Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan could not have happened - nor the many talks on the subject I have given at universities and arts festivals in recent years, including this year for the English Department at Stanford.

Peter also gave me a great deal of other material about, and intelligent, enthusiastic comment on, pre-war blues, including photocopying for me the sleevenotes of many rare vinyl albums that featured Blind Willie McTell - an invaluable help when, 20 years later, I was writing Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes. I owe him a great deal.

He shared his time very generously - at his home, at the Ship Inn in St.Johns and in showing me rural outposts he loved. He visited us in England a couple of times in later years, endearing himself immediately to our then-small children, and always sent me advance copies of his CDs.

He last wrote to me, as cheerfully as ever, four days after his birthday this year. We have all lost a first-rate guitarist and a distinguished folklorist; some of us have also lost a gregarious, warm-hearted, shrewd-minded friend.

ANNIVERSARY OF ANOTHER GEORGIA BLUES GREAT'S DEATH

Tomorrow, October 21, marks the 80th anniversary of the death of Robert Hicks, aka Barbecue Bob, aged just 29, in Lithonia G.

PIANO RED . . .

. . . would have been 100 years old today. The pianist who made the doomed, and now non-existent, session with Blind Willie McTell in Augusta GA in July 1936, was born on a farm outside Hampton GA on October 19, 1911.

His real name was William Lee Perryman; his parents were sharecroppers. His last album was released in 2010  -  The Lost Atlanta Tapes. There's an interesting local review of it here. Piano Red/Dr.Feelgood died on July 25, 1985 in Atlanta, aged 73.