October 26th, 2010

Categories: Blues Education

In addition to guitar-based blues, jug bands, such as Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers and the Memphis Jug Band, were extremely popular practitioners of Memphis blues. The jug band style empasized the danceable, syncopated rhythms of early jazz and a range of other archaic folk styles. It was played on simple, sometimes homemade, instruments such as harmonicas, violins, mandolins, banjos, and guitars, backed by washboards, kazoo, guimbarde and jugs blown to supply the bass.

After World War II, as African-Americans left the Mississippi Delta and other impoverished areas of the south for urban areas, many musicians gravitated to Memphis' blues scene, changing the classic Memphis blues sound. Musicians such as Howlin' Wolf, Willie Nix, Ike Turner, and B.B.King performed on Beale Street and in West Memphis, and recorded some of the classic electric blues, rhythm and blues and rock & roll records for labels such as Sun Records. Sam Phillips' Sun Records company recorded musicians such as Howlin' Wolf (before he moved to Chicago), Willie Nix, Ike Turner, and B.B.King.[1] These players had a strong influence on later musicians in these styles, notably the early rock & rollers and rockabillies, many of whom also recorded for Sun Records. After Phillips discovered Elvis Presley in 1954, the Sun label turned to the rapidly expanding white audience and started recording mostly rock 'n' roll.[2]

His reign as King of the Blues has been as long as that of any monarch on earth. Yet B.B. King continues to wear his crown well. At age 76, he is still light on his feet, singing and playing the blues with relentless passion. Time has no apparent effect on B.B., other than to make him more popular, more cherished, more relevant than ever. Don't look for him in some kind of semi-retirement; look for him out on the road, playing for people, popping up in a myriad of T.V. commercials, or laying down tracks for his next album. B.B. King is as alive as the music he plays, and a grateful world can't get enough of him.

For more than half a century, Riley B. King - better known as B.B. King - has defined the blues for a worldwide audience. Since he started recording in the 1940s, he has released over fifty albums, many of them classics. He was born September 16, 1925, on a plantation in Itta Bena, Mississippi, near Indianola. In his youth, he played on street corners for dimes, and would sometimes play in as many as four towns a night. In 1947, he hitchhiked to Memphis, TN, to pursue his music career. Memphis was where every important musician of the South gravitated, and which supported a large musical community where every style of African American music could be found. B.B. stayed with his cousin Bukka White, one of the most celebrated blues performers of his time, who schooled B.B. further in the art of the blues.

B.B.'s first big break came in 1948 when he performed on Sonny Boy Williamson's radio program on KWEM out of West Memphis. This led to steady engagements at the Sixteenth Avenue Grill in West Memphis, and later to a ten-minute spot on black-staffed and managed Memphis radio station WDIA. "King's Spot," became so popular, it was expanded and became the "Sepia Swing Club." Soon B.B. needed a catchy radio name. What started out as Beale Street Blues Boy was shortened to Blues Boy King, and eventually B.B. King.

In the mid-1950s, while B.B. was performing at a dance in Twist, Arkansas, a few fans became unruly. Two men got into a fight and knocked over a kerosene stove, setting fire to the hall. B.B. raced outdoors to safety with everyone else, then realized that he left his beloved $30 acoustic guitar inside, so he rushed back inside the burning building to retrieve it, narrowly escaping death. When he later found out that the fight had been over a woman named Lucille, he decided to give the name to his guitar to remind him never to do a crazy thing like fight over a woman. Ever since, each one of B.B.'s trademark Gibson guitars has been called Lucille.

Soon after his number one hit, "Three O'Clock Blues," B.B. began touring nationally. In 1956, B.B. and his band played an astonishing 342 one-night stands. From the chitlin circuit with its small-town cafes, juke joints, and country dance halls to rock palaces, symphony concert halls, universities, resort hotels and amphitheaters, nationally and internationally, B.B. has become the most renowned blues musician of the past 40 years.

Over the years, B.B. has developed one of the world's most identifiable guitar styles. He borrowed from Blind Lemon Jefferson, T-Bone Walker and others, integrating his precise and complex vocal-like string bends and his left hand vibrato, both of which have become indispensable components of rock guitarist's vocabulary. His economy, his every-note-counts phrasing, has been a model for thousands of players, from Eric Clapton and George Harrison to Jeff Beck. B.B. has mixed traditional blues, jazz, swing, mainstream pop and jump into a unique sound. In B.B.'s words, "When I sing, I play in my mind; the minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille."

In 1968, B.B. played at the Newport Folk Festival and at Bill Graham's Fillmore West on bills with the hottest contemporary rock artists of the day who idolized B.B. and helped to introduce him to a young white audience. In ``69, B.B. was chosen by the Rolling Stones to open 18 American concerts for them; Ike and Tina Turner also played on 18 shows.

B.B. was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1984 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. He received NARAS' Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award in 1987, and has received honorary doctorates from Tougaloo(MS) College in 1973; Yale University in 1977; Berklee College of Music in 1982; Rhodes College of Memphis in 1990; Mississippi Valley State University in 2002 and Brown University in 2007. In 1992, he received the National Award of Distinction from the University of Mississippi.

In 1991, B.B. King's Blues Club opened on Beale Street in Memphis, and in 1994, a second club was launched at Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles. A third club in New York City's Times Square opened in June 2000 and most recently two clubs opened at Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut in January 2002. In 1996, the CD-Rom On The Road With B.B. King: An Interactive Autobiography was released to rave reviews. Also in 1996, B.B.'s autobiography, "Blues All Around Me" (written with David Ritz for Avon Books) was published. In a similar vein, Doubleday published "The Arrival of B.B. King" by Charles Sawyer, in 1980.

B.B. continues to tour extensively, averaging over 250 concerts per year around the world. Classics such as "Payin' The Cost To Be The Boss," "The Thrill Is Gone," How Blue Can You Get," "Everyday I Have The Blues," and "Why I Sing The Blues" are concert (and fan) staples. Over the years, the Grammy Award-winner has had two #1 R&B hits, 1951's "Three O'Clock Blues," and 1952's "You Don't Know Me," and four #2 R&B hits, 1953's "Please Love Me," 1954's "You Upset Me Baby," 1960's "Sweet Sixteen, Part I," and 1966's "Don't Answer The Door, Part I." B.B.'s most popular crossover hit, 1970's "The Thrill Is Gone," went to #15 pop.

September 14th, 2010

Categories: Blues Education

The Chicago blues is a form of blues music that developed in Chicago, Illinois, by taking the basic acoustic guitar and harmonica-based Delta blues, making the harmonica louder with a microphone and an instrument amplifier, and adding electrically amplified guitar, amplified bass guitar, drums, piano and sometimes saxophone and trumpet. The music developed in the first half of the twentieth century due to the Great Migration (African American) when ex-slave Black workers moved from the South into the industrial cities of the North such as Chicago.

Originally, the Chicago Blues was street-corner based music. But after the music quickly gained popularity, it became a giant commercial enterprise. Soon the new style of music reached out and touched Europe, which led to many famous English rock n' roll bands to get their inspiration from the Chicago Blues.

Guitarist Hubert Sumlin and Howlin' Wolf

At first, the Blues clubs in Chicago were filled with Black performers, and the music itself was aimed for Black audiences. Most of the Blues clubs were on the far south side of Chicago, so White people did not visit them. Later, however, more and more White audiences visited the clubs and listened to the music. This caused clubs to open up on the north side. In addition, more White men started playing the Blues after it became popular.

Chicago Blues has a more extended palette of notes than the standard six-note blues scale; often, notes from the major scale and dominant 9th chords are added, which gives the music a more of a "jazz feel" while remaining in the confines of the blues genre. Chicago blues is also known for its heavy rolling bass. Like Delta Blues, Chicago Blues often uses a harmonica and occasionally saxophones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_blues

August 17th, 2010

Categories: Blues Education, The Blues Dude News

The history of the harmonica, as we know it today, is an amazing tale which begins in the year 1821. It was then that sixteen-year-old Christian Friedrich Buschmann registered the first European patents for his new musical invention. His so called "aura" was a free-reed instrument consisting of a series of steel reeds arranged together horizontally in small channels. An awkward design, it offered only blow notes arranged chromatically.

Buschmann described his new instrument to his brother as "a new instrument that is truly remarkable. In its entirety it measures but four inches in diameter...but gives me twenty-one notes, and all the pianissimos and crescendos one could want without a keyboard, harmonies of six tones, and the ability to hold a note as long as one would wish to."

Harrison Harmonica's B Radical - http://www.harrisonharmonicas.com/

Initial designs by Buschmann were widely imitated, leading to many modifications and advancements. A Bohemian instrument maker named Richter may have made the most important advancements in early harmonica design. Around 1826, he developed a variation that consisted of ten holes and twenty reeds, with separate blow and draw reed plates mounted on either side of a cedar comb. Richter's tuning, utilizing a diatonic scale, became the standard configuration of what Europeans referred to as the Mundharmonika or mouth organ

In 1857, the history of the harmonica changed dramatically as German clock maker Matthias Hohner turned to manufacturing harmonicas full-time. With the help of his family and a hired workman, he was able to produce 650 instruments that year. Soon after, he added local workers and developed mass production techniques.

Young Hohner was an outstanding businessman and showed his marketing savvy by developing the charactoristic ornate cover plates bearing the producer's name.

Hohner USA

He introduced the harmonica to North America in 1862, a move which would propel the Hohner company to its status as world leader in harmonicas. By 1887, Hohner was producing more than one million harmonicas annually. Today, Hohner produces over 90 different models of harmonica, with a variety of styles and tunings which allows the player freedom of expression in all forms of music, from Classical and Jazz to Blues, Country and Rock, to music of the people worldwide.

But, who writes history?
If it was not for the Le Oskar Major Diatomic (C) sitting besides my computer
would we write about Harmonicas, today?
Or, is it because, we drew (and blew) our first breath on an Hohner and ........?

August 11th, 2010

Categories: Blues Education, The Blues Dude News

The juke joints are dying.

“We used to have big crowds, every Friday night especially, and check nights,” said James Alford, manager of Smitty’s Red Top Lounge in Clarksdale, Miss. “But [now] it’s not like that… The casinos have affected this place terribly.” Casinos, home to the gambling that Mississippi legalized six years ago, are also home to free music, free drinks and free food. To a juke joint business already fighting a slow death from more modern entertainment competition, the casinos are accelerating their demise. Perry Payton runs the Flowing Fountain Lounge in Greenville, Miss.: “Right now…I play a band here, I have to charge at least $15. Tyrone [Davis] played [at the casino] and it was free. I think Little Milton was $5. Lynn White was free.” Payton says his business has fallen off 65 percent to 70 percent since the arrival of riverboat gambling.

“As long as you play the machines and give away liquor, you can’t compete with that, you know.” Even the traditional juke-joint back room gambling has taken a back seat to glitzy corporate casinos. They’ve “stopped that business. Done stopped that,” says Chester Johnson of Dublin, Miss. “They don’t look for no crap games and card games now… Everybody be going [to the casinos] now.
“Yeah, that casino got everything they near about wanted. They got them games and whiskey too up there, you know, them drinks… They got the crowd now.” For most of this century, the Delta had as many country jukes and blues joints as it did churches. Casey George, a former professional gambler from Dublin, Miss., remembers a time when “just about every house you pass near abouts, everybody [having a party].”

The rural weekend establishments were usually run by a local bootlegger or by someone selling his product. They provided musical entertainment in homes or in abandoned sharecropper houses as a means of selling food and corn liquor for profit. Juke joints also contributed to the formation of one of this country’s most enduring and important cultural legacies: the blues. If the Mississippi Delta was the cultural crucible that birthed the blues, then the juke joint was the kiln where the musical fires burned brightest. For black Delta sharecroppers, isolated by a lack of transportation, they were a social outlet and a “pressure valve” to vent the week’s stress.

“Sometimes they’d just drive that tractor up there and jump off and go on in there,” Alford said, remembering his mother’s Charleston, Miss., joint. “[You’d] see a lot of tractors, mules and stuff. As long as you on the plantation, you could drive the tractor anywhere you want.” Irene Williams, “Mama ‘Rene” to locals, runs the Do Drop Inn in Shelby, Miss.: “The juke joints, to me, enable the peoples to go out and ventilate. When you work hard, you’re tense... Not able to pay bills, not able to buy the amount of groceries that you need to buy. Not able to do a lot of things that you want to do. And when you go to these places you’re able to ventilate and let off the stress, and you’re able to cope the next week with your problems better.” In the lawless days of early Delta culture, that blowing off steam would often get violent. Legendary slide guitarist Robert Nighthawk sang about that darker side of Delta night life in 1964: I come in home last night just about 4 o’clock, A little moonshine joint in the rear was just beginning to rock.I kind of eased up side to get a bett view, I saw my baby doing the monkey too.Yeah, gonna murder my babyIf she don’t stop cheatin’ and lyin’Well I’d rather be in the penitentiarThan to be worried out of my mind.

Stanley Roque (pronounced "Rock") inherited Roque's Blues Hall from his father, who opened it in 1938. Think about that: With the exception of a short period in the 1960s, Roque's Blues Hall has operated continuously and in the same building at the same location for almost 60 years. If another juke joint can match that record, please send me its name and address. Roque's Blues Hall 235 Carver Avenue Natchitoches, LA 71457

— “Going Down to Eli’s”
Chester Johnson remembers: “If you stayed there till about 10 o’clock and didn’t nothing happen, you better go on home. ’Cause from about 11 o’clock on there’s gonna be some shootin’ going on. Some guy’s gonna whoop his old lady about dancing with somebody.” Despite the occasional violence, and the obvious liquor law violations in dry Mississippi, juke operators and their patrons had little to fear from local law enforcement. “You paid that man to sell that whiskey,” Alford said. “They didn’t say it like that, but that’s all they were doing — paying the sheriff or the chief of police or whoever would let you sell.”

White plantation owners also discouraged police from interfering with the social lives of their tenants. “If they didn’t call the law, you better not catch the law out there,” Johnson said. “[They’d say] ‘Don’t come on the place if I didn’t send for ‘em.’” To survive, some juke joints are changing. Since few Delta club owners make enough from their businesses to live on — even in good times — casino competition has forced many into some creative marketing to lure their customers back, and to reel tourists in.

Alford says today’s crowds that take in the genuine live blues shows at Smitty’s Red Top Lounge aren’t from around Clarksdale. “I’ve had a bus load of Belgians, bus load of Scandinavians,’’ he said. “Most of the crowd I get now is tourists and people from out of town wanting to hear the blues.” Tyrone Jordan who manages the Windy City Blues Club in Shelby, Miss., is one of the many who have added “tease shows” to the lineup, where dancers stripped to the bare essentials, but never got fully nude. “They really work,’’ Jordan said. “At 2 [a.m.] we were still making eight dollars at the door per person. We’ve never done that in this club before.’’

After a recent show, though, a brawl broke out. It took the Shelby police and nearby Cleveland’s force to restore peace and order. Since then, Shelby has imposed a 1 a.m. curfew, hurting the late-night joints’ dwindling business even further. E.V. Wright, who runs the Black Castle in Ruleville, Miss., has moved on a step to avoid the scrutiny of small-town officials who frown on the sexy shows. “I used to have them, but I found out they don’t want you to do that,’’ Wright said. “I let that alone and I told [my son Everett] to start having rap shows. ’Cause a strip show will draw a lot of people, but a rap show will draw more people.”
As recently as 1994, Irene Williams was working to expand her weathered, shotgun shack Do Drop Inn in Shelby. Sunday night live radio broadcasts from the club were packing the house — acts like the Wesley Jefferson band would cook through funky blues and R&B, couples would dance the sensual slow drag and shouts and laughter would bounce off the walls. That was when Mama ‘Rene was selling enough plates of home-cooked food and tall-boy cans of Budweiser to make ends meet. Now the food is still good, the beer is still cold. But those crowds are gone — they’re filling the casinos in Robinsonville and Greenville.
She’s finally let the band go, after a year of paying them out of her pocket. And instead of her dream to retire, run the club on weekends and cook during the week, Williams is looking to sell the club she’s run since 1971, and focus on running her personal care home in nearby Wintonville — assisted living, Delta-style. “Unless something gives, I won’t be here very long,’’ she said. “I’m going to be in Wintonville, just dreaming about the used-to-be… You see the things that mean so much to you just fade away, you know. “You heard that song about it used to be? Yeah, I’ll be dreaming about that.”

©2000 Bill Steber

http://www.steberphoto.com/articles-1.htm

Page 1 of 1 pages