Monday, 21 December 2009
ALLMAN BROTHERS FANS NOTICE THE BOOK
A short spread about Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes, including a couple of uncontroversial comments on Willie, has suddenly popped up on this Allman Brothers Band discussion forum. (Maybe when the person who's posted it has read the early pages of the book, s/he will comment on the Allmans content...)
Saturday, 19 December 2009
BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON
Today it's 80 years since the death of that most influential bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson. Here's what I write about him at the start of Chapter 12 of Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes, at the point in the narrative at which Willie McTell has just made his first record, in October 1927, for Victor Records:
Willie hoped his first record would make him a big star rising: that it would launch him into that elusive blues stratosphere, with sales to match those of Bessie Smith, Georgia’s own Ma Rainey and the Texan singer-guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson, who had shot to prominence only the year before, the first male blues singer to achieve a hit. Jefferson’s second release, ‘Got The Blues’, combined thrilling guitar virtuosity with the striking opening line “The blues come to Texas, loping like a mule”, and he would soon colonise “race records” for male singers with guitars rather than women with pianists and orchestral combos. Jefferson would also reach out over the airwaves, in time, and come to influence generations of white Appalachian mountain musicians who wouldn’t have liked his face at their cabin doors but who loved his music and his high-pitched voice coming out of their crystal-set radios. He didn’t live to enjoy stardom long: he recorded nearly 100 sides in under four years and then died in Chicago at the age of 36, six days before Christmas 1929. It used to be said that he froze to death on the street in a blizzard, but his producer, J. Mayo Williams, alleged later that he’d collapsed in the back seat of his automobile and that his chauffeur, instead of helping him, had run away.
Willie McTell couldn’t freeze to death in Atlanta, but nor did he rise among the stars. He never had a hit record - but he continued to be able to record for major labels, and the sides he made kept on glistening with promise, so that everyone who heard him recognised his artistry and his name became known all over the South. For the first two or three years he must have felt that next time, next time, he’d have a hit.
There's also an entry on Blind Lemon in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, which includes discussing his influence on Elvis Presley as well as on Dylan (and of course on the blues in general). I've reprinted this entry as today's blog entry here on my Dylan blog.
Willie hoped his first record would make him a big star rising: that it would launch him into that elusive blues stratosphere, with sales to match those of Bessie Smith, Georgia’s own Ma Rainey and the Texan singer-guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson, who had shot to prominence only the year before, the first male blues singer to achieve a hit. Jefferson’s second release, ‘Got The Blues’, combined thrilling guitar virtuosity with the striking opening line “The blues come to Texas, loping like a mule”, and he would soon colonise “race records” for male singers with guitars rather than women with pianists and orchestral combos. Jefferson would also reach out over the airwaves, in time, and come to influence generations of white Appalachian mountain musicians who wouldn’t have liked his face at their cabin doors but who loved his music and his high-pitched voice coming out of their crystal-set radios. He didn’t live to enjoy stardom long: he recorded nearly 100 sides in under four years and then died in Chicago at the age of 36, six days before Christmas 1929. It used to be said that he froze to death on the street in a blizzard, but his producer, J. Mayo Williams, alleged later that he’d collapsed in the back seat of his automobile and that his chauffeur, instead of helping him, had run away.
Willie McTell couldn’t freeze to death in Atlanta, but nor did he rise among the stars. He never had a hit record - but he continued to be able to record for major labels, and the sides he made kept on glistening with promise, so that everyone who heard him recognised his artistry and his name became known all over the South. For the first two or three years he must have felt that next time, next time, he’d have a hit.
There's also an entry on Blind Lemon in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, which includes discussing his influence on Elvis Presley as well as on Dylan (and of course on the blues in general). I've reprinted this entry as today's blog entry here on my Dylan blog.
Thursday, 17 December 2009
FRANCIS WILFORD-SMITH
I'm sorry to hear of the death, on December 4, of Francis Wilford-Smith, a splendidly old-fashioned enthusiast for, and early expert on, the pre-war blues, and especially the piano blues.
He was an avid collector of 78rpm records, a broadcaster on BBC Radio 3 and the compiler of some excellent piano blues LPs on the British label Magpie Records, drawing all the material from his own collection, beginning with Magpie 4400, Paramount 1929-1930 'whip it to a jelly' (The Piano Blues Vol. 1), in 1977, and often calling upon Paul Oliver to write the sleevenotes. Wilford Smith also field recorded Roosevelt Sykes and Little Brother Montgomery at his home in Sussex in 1960, yielding two 1980s LPs of the latter: These Are What I Like: Unissued Recordings Vol. 1 and Those I Liked I Learned: Unissued Recordings Vol. 2. More or less Edwardian-bristling-moustache in persona, Wilford-Smith owned more than one penny-farthing bicycle, and there is a photograph of Little Brother Montgomery encountering one of these. (I have failed to locate it online.)
Wilford-Smith had studied under John Minton at Camberwell School of Art, where he was a contemporary of Humphrey Lyttelton and the Canadian-born Wally Fawkes ('Trog'). He made a good living from cartoons published under the pen name 'Smilby' in Playboy (and a bit extra from others in Punch), which allowed him to outbid others for rare 78s.
Wilford-Smith was 82, had suffered from Parkinson's Disease since 1994, and spent his last years in a nursing home. He died asleep in bed.
He was an avid collector of 78rpm records, a broadcaster on BBC Radio 3 and the compiler of some excellent piano blues LPs on the British label Magpie Records, drawing all the material from his own collection, beginning with Magpie 4400, Paramount 1929-1930 'whip it to a jelly' (The Piano Blues Vol. 1), in 1977, and often calling upon Paul Oliver to write the sleevenotes. Wilford Smith also field recorded Roosevelt Sykes and Little Brother Montgomery at his home in Sussex in 1960, yielding two 1980s LPs of the latter: These Are What I Like: Unissued Recordings Vol. 1 and Those I Liked I Learned: Unissued Recordings Vol. 2. More or less Edwardian-bristling-moustache in persona, Wilford-Smith owned more than one penny-farthing bicycle, and there is a photograph of Little Brother Montgomery encountering one of these. (I have failed to locate it online.)
Wilford-Smith had studied under John Minton at Camberwell School of Art, where he was a contemporary of Humphrey Lyttelton and the Canadian-born Wally Fawkes ('Trog'). He made a good living from cartoons published under the pen name 'Smilby' in Playboy (and a bit extra from others in Punch), which allowed him to outbid others for rare 78s.
Wilford-Smith was 82, had suffered from Parkinson's Disease since 1994, and spent his last years in a nursing home. He died asleep in bed.
Wednesday, 16 December 2009
GEORGIA PUBLIC BROADCASTING INTERVIEW
In Atlanta a couple of months ago, I recorded a (comparatively long) interview, conducted by Jeff Calder, about Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes and my researches into the life, work and world of Blind Willie McTell. I've just heard that it's going to be broadcast this coming Sunday. Details are here.
Now I'm back home for Christmas, and the pond in the garden is frozen this morning for the first time since winter arrived. But the sky is trying to brighten, and there's neither rain nor snow.
Meanwhile, I expect to have good news about the book to report shortly!
Now I'm back home for Christmas, and the pond in the garden is frozen this morning for the first time since winter arrived. But the sky is trying to brighten, and there's neither rain nor snow.
Meanwhile, I expect to have good news about the book to report shortly!
Sunday, 6 December 2009
60th ANNIVERSARY OF LEADBELLY'S DEATH
Leadbelly died 60 years ago today. Here's his entry in my book The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia ( a name in capital letters mean there's an entry on this person too) but if this were being written now it would add that there is a recent Leadbelly biography, co-compiled by John Reynolds - the man who rescued the classic shot of Blind Willie McTell from a pile of trash back at the beginning of the 1960s, and without whom we simply would not have that crucial photograph of Willie in his prime. Lead Belly: A Life in Pictures by Tiny Robinson and John Reynolds, was first published in Germany in 2007 and then in the UK in April 2008. (You'll find it in the "Recommended" section of the right-hand column of this blog.) But here's the Bob Dylan Encyclopedia entry:
Leadbelly [1888 - 1949]
Huddie Ledbetter was born at Mooringsport, near Shiloh, Louisiana on January 21, 1888 and learnt to play accordion, piano, harmonica and then guitar. By the age of 15 he was a father of two with a police record after his involvement in a shooting, and was singing in the red-light district of Shreveport. Moving to Dallas, Texas he met and learnt songs from BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON and moved onto the 12-string guitar, of which he became an almost incomparable master (perhaps only equalled by BLIND WILLIE McTELL) with a distinctively strong rhythmic style.
He spent nearly as much time in prison as busking on the streets, and when the folklorist John A. Lomax and his then-teenage son ALAN LOMAX encountered him in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola in July 1933, he already had two pardons behind him (he had killed a man in Texas in 1917) and was now serving what was supposed to be another 30-sentence, but after proving an incomparable source of black folksong and 19th century repertoire on the field recordings he made for the Lomaxes for the Library of Congress, they obtained his pardon once again and this time set him to work as their chauffeur and recording assistant. After this, he travelled with them on many field trips but was also presented as a performer to folksong societies and in progressive East Coast establishment society, becoming in the 1940s part of a circle of left-wing folk enthusiasts and musicians (as you can tell by the very title ‘The Bourgeois Blues’) that included WOODY GUTHRIE, SONNY TERRY & BROWNIE McGHEE, Alan Lomax and PETE SEEGER. In Tony Russell’s words, ‘Leadbelly the performer and the Leadbelly songbook are twin peaks on the map of American music. His enormous repertoire has no parallel in black folksong. He sang everything, ballads and blues-ballads, dance songs and children’s rhymes, memories of minstrelsy and freshly made songs about his own rapidly changing circumstances. To his white audiences he seemed a mythic figure, a lone carrier of all-but-lost messages from black worlds of field and prison farm.’
As this implies, little of his repertoire was really the blues, though ‘Good Morning Blues’ and ‘The Bourgeois Blues’ are prized items. In the mid-1940s he tried to ‘make it’ in Hollywood but was unsuccessful and returned to live in New York by 1947, making his one foreign trip in 1949 - to Paris - before dying in New York City that December 6, of a form of motor neurone disease termed Lou Gehrig’s disease. No sooner was he dead than Pete Seeger’s goody-goody group the Weavers had a no.1 hit single with a revoltingly twee version of a song he’d refashioned from a 19th century minstrel number, ‘Goodnight Irene’. (The other Weavers were Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays and Fred Hellerman; Lee Hays is the one who looked, back then, exactly like the 2005 British Home Secretary, Charles Clarke.) By the end of the 1950s we were all familiar with Leadbelly songs: the UK’s father of skiffle, Lonnie Donegan, signalled his 1956 shift from ‘jazz’ to ‘rock’n’roll’ with a hit version of ‘Rock Island Line’, while between them, skiffle and the Folk Revival ensured the continued circulation of ‘Boll Weevil’ (of which Leadbelly’s own recording is soaringly the best), ‘Midnight Special’, ‘Pick a Bale O’ Cotton’, ‘Bring Me A Li’l Water Silvy’, ‘Take A Whiff On Me’ (as ‘Have A Drink On Me’ by Mr. Donegan) and ‘Cotton Fields’.
‘Midnight Special’ was the song on which Dylan had played harmonica behind HARRY BELAFONTE in February 1962, shortly ahead of the release of his own début album; but there is a longer connecting thread between Leadbelly and Dylan’s work than that, and beyond the fact of Leadbelly’s repertoire having both informed the understanding of, and permeated so thoroughly into, the common currency of the Folk Revival - such that, for instance, Dylan was performing ‘Ain’t No More Cane On The Brazos (Go Down Old Hannah)’ at the Gaslight Café in October 1962; that when Dylan recorded a version of ‘Milk Cow Blues’ in 1962, he used part of Kokomo Arnold’s lyric, part of ELVIS PRESLEY’s, part of ROBERT JOHNSON’s ‘Milkcow’s Calf Blues’ and part of Leadbelly’s ‘Good Morning Blues’; and that he and HAPPY TRAUM were performing ‘Keep Your Hands Off Her’ in February 1963.
First, it was a set of Leadbelly 78rpm records, given to Dylan as a gift before he left Hibbing, that proved his first revelatory direct initiation into the pre-war black repertoire. He might well have proved the first person Dylan heard who ‘talked his way into a song’, in ROBERT SHELTON’s phrase, as he did duly did himself on his first album.
The Leadbelly favourite ‘Pig Meat Mama’ offers a vivacious demonstration of something we’re likely to think still more Dylanesque. That is, given an ostentatious rhyme, he delivers it with a sly knowingness which, far from downplaying it, milks its comic extravagance to the full, by throwing in a pause just long enough to draw attention to itself immediately ahead of the clamorous rhyme. In this song from 1935, Leadbelly gives us ‘...Louisiana / ...Texacana / ...a girl named [pause] Silvana!’ This is a way of writing and delivering lines that we know well from many Dylan recordings, such as the ‘Angelina’ rhymes in the 1981 song of that name, the risky comedy of ‘subpoena’ being the one that pushes this furthest. It’s the same glee that tops ‘the castle honey’ with ‘El [pause] Paso honey’ in the superb 1966 outtake ‘She’s Your Lover Now’. (Actually, Silvana might not have struck Leadbelly as an especially attention-grabbing name: he had an adopted sister called Australia.)
Leadbelly’s breadth of repertoire is used by Dylan in a quite different way, too. In a speech onstage at the Fox-Warfield Theatre in San Francisco in 1980, Dylan tells the audience this, about Leadbelly switching from prison songs to children’s songs - offering it as a parable about his own switch from secular to Christian songs: ‘He made lots of records there [in New York]. At first he was just doing prison songs, and stuff like that.... He’d been out of prison for some time when he decided to do children’s songs. And people said “Oh my! Did Leadbelly change?”.... But he didn’t change. He was the same man.’
[Leadbelly: ‘Good Morning Blues’, NY 15 Jun 1940 or summer 1943; ‘The Bourgeois Blues’, NY 1 Apr 1939; ‘Irene’, Angola LA, 16-20 Jul 1933 & 1 Jul 1934, & Wilton CT, 20 Jan 1935; ‘Rock Island Line’, Washington D.C., 22 Jun 1937, NY, Jan 1942 & (with the Golden Gate Quartet) NY, 15 Jun 1940; ‘Boll Weevil’, Shreveport LA, prob. Oct 1934, Wilton CT, Feb 1935 & NY, 19 Jun 1940; ‘The Boll Weevil’, NY 1 Apr 1939; ‘Midnight Special’, Angola LA, 1 Jul 1934, Wilton CT, Feb 1935 & (w Golden Gate Quartet) NY, 15 Jun 1940; ‘Pick A Bale A’Cotton’, NY 25 Jan 1935; ‘Pick A Bale O’ Cotton’, Wilton CT, Mar 1935; ‘Pick A Bale Of Cotton’ (w Golden Gate Quartet), NY, 15 Jun 1940; ‘Bring Me A Li’l Water Silvy’, Wilton, Mar 1935; ‘Bring Me Lil Water Silvy’, NY, late 1943; ‘Honey Take A Whiff On Me’, Angola 16-20 Jul 1933; ‘Take A Whiff On Me’, Angola, prob. 1 Jul 1934 & Wilton, 1 Feb 1935; ‘Baby Take A Whiff On Me’, NY, 25 Jan 1935; ‘Go Down, Old Hannah’, Wilton, Mar 1935; ‘Ain’t Goin’ Down To The Well No Mo’/‘Go Down Old Hannah’, NY 1 Apr 1939; ‘Pig Meat Mama’, NY, 25 Mar 35; Negro Folk Songs For Young People”, Folkways FC 7533, NY, c.1962; a good general selection of his work is CD-reissued Leadbelly: King Of The Twelve-String Guitar, Columbia Roots N’ Blues Series 467893 4, NY, 1991.
Dylan on Leadbelly & children’s songs, San Francisco, 12 Nov 1980, quoted from ‘Bob Dylan’s Leadbelly Parable’, in Michael Gray & John Bauldie, eds., All Across The Telegraph: A Bob Dylan Handbook, London: W.H. Allen, 1987. Tony Russell, ‘Leadbelly’, From Robert Johnson to Robert Cray, London: Aurum Press, 1997, p.38. Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, London: Penguine edn, 1987, p.119.]
Leadbelly [1888 - 1949]
Huddie Ledbetter was born at Mooringsport, near Shiloh, Louisiana on January 21, 1888 and learnt to play accordion, piano, harmonica and then guitar. By the age of 15 he was a father of two with a police record after his involvement in a shooting, and was singing in the red-light district of Shreveport. Moving to Dallas, Texas he met and learnt songs from BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON and moved onto the 12-string guitar, of which he became an almost incomparable master (perhaps only equalled by BLIND WILLIE McTELL) with a distinctively strong rhythmic style.
He spent nearly as much time in prison as busking on the streets, and when the folklorist John A. Lomax and his then-teenage son ALAN LOMAX encountered him in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola in July 1933, he already had two pardons behind him (he had killed a man in Texas in 1917) and was now serving what was supposed to be another 30-sentence, but after proving an incomparable source of black folksong and 19th century repertoire on the field recordings he made for the Lomaxes for the Library of Congress, they obtained his pardon once again and this time set him to work as their chauffeur and recording assistant. After this, he travelled with them on many field trips but was also presented as a performer to folksong societies and in progressive East Coast establishment society, becoming in the 1940s part of a circle of left-wing folk enthusiasts and musicians (as you can tell by the very title ‘The Bourgeois Blues’) that included WOODY GUTHRIE, SONNY TERRY & BROWNIE McGHEE, Alan Lomax and PETE SEEGER. In Tony Russell’s words, ‘Leadbelly the performer and the Leadbelly songbook are twin peaks on the map of American music. His enormous repertoire has no parallel in black folksong. He sang everything, ballads and blues-ballads, dance songs and children’s rhymes, memories of minstrelsy and freshly made songs about his own rapidly changing circumstances. To his white audiences he seemed a mythic figure, a lone carrier of all-but-lost messages from black worlds of field and prison farm.’
As this implies, little of his repertoire was really the blues, though ‘Good Morning Blues’ and ‘The Bourgeois Blues’ are prized items. In the mid-1940s he tried to ‘make it’ in Hollywood but was unsuccessful and returned to live in New York by 1947, making his one foreign trip in 1949 - to Paris - before dying in New York City that December 6, of a form of motor neurone disease termed Lou Gehrig’s disease. No sooner was he dead than Pete Seeger’s goody-goody group the Weavers had a no.1 hit single with a revoltingly twee version of a song he’d refashioned from a 19th century minstrel number, ‘Goodnight Irene’. (The other Weavers were Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays and Fred Hellerman; Lee Hays is the one who looked, back then, exactly like the 2005 British Home Secretary, Charles Clarke.) By the end of the 1950s we were all familiar with Leadbelly songs: the UK’s father of skiffle, Lonnie Donegan, signalled his 1956 shift from ‘jazz’ to ‘rock’n’roll’ with a hit version of ‘Rock Island Line’, while between them, skiffle and the Folk Revival ensured the continued circulation of ‘Boll Weevil’ (of which Leadbelly’s own recording is soaringly the best), ‘Midnight Special’, ‘Pick a Bale O’ Cotton’, ‘Bring Me A Li’l Water Silvy’, ‘Take A Whiff On Me’ (as ‘Have A Drink On Me’ by Mr. Donegan) and ‘Cotton Fields’.
‘Midnight Special’ was the song on which Dylan had played harmonica behind HARRY BELAFONTE in February 1962, shortly ahead of the release of his own début album; but there is a longer connecting thread between Leadbelly and Dylan’s work than that, and beyond the fact of Leadbelly’s repertoire having both informed the understanding of, and permeated so thoroughly into, the common currency of the Folk Revival - such that, for instance, Dylan was performing ‘Ain’t No More Cane On The Brazos (Go Down Old Hannah)’ at the Gaslight Café in October 1962; that when Dylan recorded a version of ‘Milk Cow Blues’ in 1962, he used part of Kokomo Arnold’s lyric, part of ELVIS PRESLEY’s, part of ROBERT JOHNSON’s ‘Milkcow’s Calf Blues’ and part of Leadbelly’s ‘Good Morning Blues’; and that he and HAPPY TRAUM were performing ‘Keep Your Hands Off Her’ in February 1963.
First, it was a set of Leadbelly 78rpm records, given to Dylan as a gift before he left Hibbing, that proved his first revelatory direct initiation into the pre-war black repertoire. He might well have proved the first person Dylan heard who ‘talked his way into a song’, in ROBERT SHELTON’s phrase, as he did duly did himself on his first album.
The Leadbelly favourite ‘Pig Meat Mama’ offers a vivacious demonstration of something we’re likely to think still more Dylanesque. That is, given an ostentatious rhyme, he delivers it with a sly knowingness which, far from downplaying it, milks its comic extravagance to the full, by throwing in a pause just long enough to draw attention to itself immediately ahead of the clamorous rhyme. In this song from 1935, Leadbelly gives us ‘...Louisiana / ...Texacana / ...a girl named [pause] Silvana!’ This is a way of writing and delivering lines that we know well from many Dylan recordings, such as the ‘Angelina’ rhymes in the 1981 song of that name, the risky comedy of ‘subpoena’ being the one that pushes this furthest. It’s the same glee that tops ‘the castle honey’ with ‘El [pause] Paso honey’ in the superb 1966 outtake ‘She’s Your Lover Now’. (Actually, Silvana might not have struck Leadbelly as an especially attention-grabbing name: he had an adopted sister called Australia.)
Leadbelly’s breadth of repertoire is used by Dylan in a quite different way, too. In a speech onstage at the Fox-Warfield Theatre in San Francisco in 1980, Dylan tells the audience this, about Leadbelly switching from prison songs to children’s songs - offering it as a parable about his own switch from secular to Christian songs: ‘He made lots of records there [in New York]. At first he was just doing prison songs, and stuff like that.... He’d been out of prison for some time when he decided to do children’s songs. And people said “Oh my! Did Leadbelly change?”.... But he didn’t change. He was the same man.’
[Leadbelly: ‘Good Morning Blues’, NY 15 Jun 1940 or summer 1943; ‘The Bourgeois Blues’, NY 1 Apr 1939; ‘Irene’, Angola LA, 16-20 Jul 1933 & 1 Jul 1934, & Wilton CT, 20 Jan 1935; ‘Rock Island Line’, Washington D.C., 22 Jun 1937, NY, Jan 1942 & (with the Golden Gate Quartet) NY, 15 Jun 1940; ‘Boll Weevil’, Shreveport LA, prob. Oct 1934, Wilton CT, Feb 1935 & NY, 19 Jun 1940; ‘The Boll Weevil’, NY 1 Apr 1939; ‘Midnight Special’, Angola LA, 1 Jul 1934, Wilton CT, Feb 1935 & (w Golden Gate Quartet) NY, 15 Jun 1940; ‘Pick A Bale A’Cotton’, NY 25 Jan 1935; ‘Pick A Bale O’ Cotton’, Wilton CT, Mar 1935; ‘Pick A Bale Of Cotton’ (w Golden Gate Quartet), NY, 15 Jun 1940; ‘Bring Me A Li’l Water Silvy’, Wilton, Mar 1935; ‘Bring Me Lil Water Silvy’, NY, late 1943; ‘Honey Take A Whiff On Me’, Angola 16-20 Jul 1933; ‘Take A Whiff On Me’, Angola, prob. 1 Jul 1934 & Wilton, 1 Feb 1935; ‘Baby Take A Whiff On Me’, NY, 25 Jan 1935; ‘Go Down, Old Hannah’, Wilton, Mar 1935; ‘Ain’t Goin’ Down To The Well No Mo’/‘Go Down Old Hannah’, NY 1 Apr 1939; ‘Pig Meat Mama’, NY, 25 Mar 35; Negro Folk Songs For Young People”, Folkways FC 7533, NY, c.1962; a good general selection of his work is CD-reissued Leadbelly: King Of The Twelve-String Guitar, Columbia Roots N’ Blues Series 467893 4, NY, 1991.
Dylan on Leadbelly & children’s songs, San Francisco, 12 Nov 1980, quoted from ‘Bob Dylan’s Leadbelly Parable’, in Michael Gray & John Bauldie, eds., All Across The Telegraph: A Bob Dylan Handbook, London: W.H. Allen, 1987. Tony Russell, ‘Leadbelly’, From Robert Johnson to Robert Cray, London: Aurum Press, 1997, p.38. Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, London: Penguine edn, 1987, p.119.]
Thursday, 29 October 2009
CRITICS' BLOG REVIEW OF THE BOOK
I'm happy to be sent another very positive review of my book, this time on blogcritics. I especially like these bits:
"By no means mere biography, it is, instead, a fascinating and often elagaic tale of his quest for information about the Georgia-born bluesman. "
"Of course there's a great deal of biographical information here, and Gray proves a careful and conscientious researcher with an obvious affection for McTell. With dogged persistence, he traces McTell's life through interviews and old documents. He uncovers much new information and gently corrects some common misconceptions based on earlier research. It's the kind of stuff that's often dry and dusty, but Gray, who hails from England, brings the quest to life with lively commentary and an outsider's wonder at the peculiarities — both good and bad — of the South."
and
"Gray's book is a lovely and fitting epitaph to a fine musician and man."
"By no means mere biography, it is, instead, a fascinating and often elagaic tale of his quest for information about the Georgia-born bluesman. "
"Of course there's a great deal of biographical information here, and Gray proves a careful and conscientious researcher with an obvious affection for McTell. With dogged persistence, he traces McTell's life through interviews and old documents. He uncovers much new information and gently corrects some common misconceptions based on earlier research. It's the kind of stuff that's often dry and dusty, but Gray, who hails from England, brings the quest to life with lively commentary and an outsider's wonder at the peculiarities — both good and bad — of the South."
and
"Gray's book is a lovely and fitting epitaph to a fine musician and man."
Tuesday, 27 October 2009
HOME & BEAN
My tour of Long Island NY (one gig) and Georgia (eight) is over. I flew out of Atlanta on Saturday afternoon, out of JFK that evening, arrived in London Sunday morning, hung around charmless Heathrow Terminal 5 all day (its one virtue being Carluccio's, a bustling, authentically Italian eaterie with genuinely friendly staff and real food [such a contrast to Georgia's]), flew into Toulouse on Sunday evening and made it home about 11.30 that night.
Among much else waiting for me, the URL to 100bookshelf, a blog that was new to me but on which someone named Bean has posted this superbly generous review of my book:
“Michael Gray’s Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes is not just one of my favorite music books, it’s one of my favorite books in general…
[It] goes, exactly as the [sub-]title says, ‘in search of’ Blind Willie. That means that this is not a biography exactly – it’s also the story of the author’s journey to find what is, essentially, a musical needle in a haystack. He meets some very interesting characters, uncovers some weird stories, travels through and to places tourists don’t usually go, and – along the way – finds out some amazing clues to who Blind Willie McTell really was…
If you’re interested in the blues, or a side of American life we don’t normally see, or both, this book is one of the best you’ll ever find. Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes is a beautiful portrait of a time and place – both past and present – as well as a fascinating glimpse into a most mysterious man.”
Among much else waiting for me, the URL to 100bookshelf, a blog that was new to me but on which someone named Bean has posted this superbly generous review of my book:
“Michael Gray’s Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes is not just one of my favorite music books, it’s one of my favorite books in general…
[It] goes, exactly as the [sub-]title says, ‘in search of’ Blind Willie. That means that this is not a biography exactly – it’s also the story of the author’s journey to find what is, essentially, a musical needle in a haystack. He meets some very interesting characters, uncovers some weird stories, travels through and to places tourists don’t usually go, and – along the way – finds out some amazing clues to who Blind Willie McTell really was…
If you’re interested in the blues, or a side of American life we don’t normally see, or both, this book is one of the best you’ll ever find. Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes is a beautiful portrait of a time and place – both past and present – as well as a fascinating glimpse into a most mysterious man.”
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