Waking up with a tune in my head on a morning when I could actually take the time to sit with my guitar and get notes down on paper was a gift.
Three days and dozens of stolen moments later, the bulk of “Before Breakfast” was done.
“Before Breakfast” dominated my repertoire for many months. However, it wasn’t until I added an intro/outro lick sometime last Summer that my compositon finally felt complete.
A couple of other pieces – fingerpicked arrangements of “Ain’t Misbehavin'” and “All My Loving” – eventually bumped “Before Breakfast” from my playlist. But this past Sunday – March 6, 2016 – I decided it was time to capture my “latest” original acoustic guitar instrumental in zeros and ones.
So, I did… and here it is!
“Before Breakfast” – composed and performed by Eric Sinclair.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen, here’s a classic track from Count Basie & His Orchestra guar-an-teeeed to add more than a little lift to your Leap Day festivities: ‘Jumpin’ At The Woodside!'”
“Jumpin’ At The Woodside” was recorded in New York City on August 22, 1938 and released on Decca Records.
Featuring William “Count” Basie on piano, the members of His Orchestra on this recording are: Buck Clayton, Harry Edison & Ed Lewis, trumpet; Dan Minor, Benny Morton & Dicky Wells, trombone; Earl Warren, alto saxophone; Herschel Evans & Lester Young, tenor saxophone & clarinet; Jack Washington, baritone saxophone & alto saxophone; Freddie Green, guitar; Walter Page, bass; Jo Jones, drums.
“Jumpin’ At The Woodside” was created – not composed – using a collaborative process frequently employed by Basie and his band that might have gone something like this:
In the midst of a full-band rehearsal, pianist Basie presents a simple, four note riff played over an 8-bar chord progression. The saxophone players learn and harmonize the riff and the trumpet players come up with a response riff. The members of the rhythm section settle on their various accompaniment parts. That becomes the pieces “A section.”
Basie then puts forth a complimentary “B section” chord progression and solos are assigned to individual players over one or the other – or both – of the sections. Back up riffs are worked out to run behind the solos and the tenor sax players decide when to switch off to their clarinets. Basie proposes an introduction using a driving, boogie-woogie-style piano bass line and, after multiple starts and stops, everyone helps establish the overall sequence of events of the final arrangement.
A piece of music created in this way was known as a “head arrangement.”
Can you imagine all of the Pop, Rock, Blues, Country & Jazz recordings of the past 90 years that have a guitar solo in them not having that guitar solo?
Well, the person who pioneered the single-string, played-with-a-pick, vibrato-and-string-bending-filled guitar solo was born on this day.
Alonzo “Lonnie” Johnson was born into a large and very musical family in New Orleans, Louisiana on February 8, 1894. In the Johnson family, Lonnie once recounted, “You’d better play something, even if you just banged on a tin can.” Lonnie started playing music on the violin then took up the piano and guitar. By the time he was a teenager he was playing professionally in the family string ensemble, directed by his father, and in a duo with his brother James “Steady Roll” Johnson, a pianist.
Lonnie and James moved to St. Louis, MO, in 1921. For almost two years, Lonnie worked in a steel foundry during the day and took all of the performing gigs he could get in the evenings and on the weekends.
In 1925, Lonnie entered a weekly Blues contest at the Booker T. Washington Theater in St. Louis. After eight straight weeks of taking first place honors, singer/guitarist Lonnie Johnson was declared the winner and awarded the grand prize: a recording contract with OKeh records.
On November 4, 1925, with OKeh Records’ executive Ralph Peer in charge of the proceedings, Lonnie Johnson recorded the two songs that would be his first record: “Mr. Johnson’s Blues” & “Falling Rain Blues.”
“Mr. Johnson’s Blues” was written by Lonnie and features John Arnold on piano. Lonnie is the vocalist and is playing a 12-string acoustic guitar.
Listen and check out those guitar solos!
Lonnie Johnson recorded for OKeh Records until 1932, cutting nearly 130 tracks. Among them were a series of ground-breaking guitar duets with Eddie Lang. However, since Eddie was a well-known white entertainer and OKeh didn’t think the record buying public was ready for a mixed race recording act, Lang was billed on these releases as “Blind Willie Dunn.”
“Handful Of Riffs” was recorded on May 8, 1929 in New York City. Even though this recording contains only the dizzying and virtuosic talents of Lonnie Johnson and Eddie Lang, it was released as being by Blind Willie Dunn and his Gin Bottle Four.
Prepare to be amazed.
In 1963, Lonnie Johnson travelled to England as a member of The American Folk Blues Festival. The following live performance features Lonnie playing electric guitar and singing the song “Another Night To Cry.” Accompanying Lonnie are pianist Otis Spann, bassist Willie Dixon and drummer Bill Stepney.
Watch & listen.
Lonnie Johnson made his last public appearance at Massey Hall in Toronto, Canada on February 23, 1970. Singing a few songs accompanied by guitarist Buddy Guy, Lonnie’s performance received a standing ovation.
Alonzo “Lonnie” Johnson passed away on June 6, 1970.
The roster of singers and guitarists who have been documented as being directly influenced by the music of Lonnie Johnson includes Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian, Robert Johnson, T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan.
In his 1982 book The Guitar Players: One Instrument & Its Masters In American Music, James Sallis wrote: “It is as a guitarist that Lonnie Johnson is best remembered now. His touch, the expressiveness he achieved on the instrument, was a revelation in his time and still affords a rich and rare harvest to guitarists. And his were the first solos to be actually built – constructed around subtle changes, gathering momentum directly from the music itself, climaxing in a way that also followed from the music and made perfect sense.”
WBLM (102.9 FM) is a 100,000-watt Classic Rock radio station broadcasting from Portland, Maine. For many years, WBLM helped its Sunday morning listeners get ready for church with an all-Blues program called The Maine Blues Project.
I didn’t get to tune in very often, but the last time I caught the show I was treated to my first hearing of a very special recording: Etta James’ cover of the 1960 Elmore James song, “The Sky Is Crying.” I later learned that the recording was from Etta’s 2004 Grammy-winning (“Best Traditional Blues Album”) RCA Victor collection called Blues To The Bone.
The rendition of “The Sky Is Crying” that stopped me in my tracks that Sunday morning used only two instruments: Etta James’ deeply soulful, aged-to-perfection voice and Brian Ray’s rumbling giant of an amplified acoustic guitar. But that was enough.
Listen.
Etta James began her solo recording career in 1955 on Modern Records. Her first record – “The Wallflower,” also known as “Dance With Me Henry” – reached #1 on the R&B chart.
Etta’s first album – At Last! – came out on Chess Records in late 1960. It contained four songs that became hit R&B singles: “All I Could Do Was Cry,” “My Dearest Darling,” “At Last” and “Trust In Me.”
“Trust In Me,” written by Ned Weaver, Milton Ager and Jean Schwartz and orchestrated by Riley Hampton, is one of my favorite tracks from At Last!
Go ahead, listen to this one, too. If you enjoyed Etta James when she was 66 years old, you have to hear how she sounded at 22!
With a career than spanned 56 years and produced 58 singles and 48 albums, Etta James’ music exerted a significant influence on a countless number of singers and musicians. Her praises have been literally and figuratively sung by dozens of well-known recording artists from Diana Ross, Janis Joplin, Rod Stewart and Bonnie Raitt to Christina Aguilera, Beyonce, Pink and Adele. In an April, 2011 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Adele revealed that hearing Etta James sing “was the first time a voice made me stop what I was doing and sit down and listen. It took over my mind and body.”
From 1961 to 2005, 15 different recordings by Etta James were nominated for a Grammy Award. Three of them – the albums Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday (1994), Let’sRoll (2003) and Blues To The Bone – won.
In 1989, the Rhythm and Blues Foundation honored Etta James with one of their first Pioneer Awards. The Foundation gave these awards to artists whose “lifelong contributions have been instrumental in the development of Rhythm & Blues music.”
In 1993, Etta James was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
In 2003, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences presented Etta James the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Etta James recorded and released her 30th and last studio album, The Dreamer, in 2011.
Etta James was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles, California on January 25, 1938.
She passed away on January 20, 2012, in Riverside, California.
(To see more Guitar TAB transcriptions, click on Guitar Music in the Categories list!)
sixstr stories, as it says on the home page above the right hand corner of the close-up photo of my favorite guitar, is “Just another WordPress.com weblog.”
Last December, the nice folks at WordPress sent me an email titled “Your 2015 year in blogging.” It contained a personalized annual report detailing how sixstr stories did statistically in 2015. Using some very cool graphics, the report provided stats in six categories including “Crunchy numbers” (how many times my blog was viewed in 2015), “How did they find you?” and “Where did they come from?”
Under “Attractions in 2015,” I learned that the two posts that got the most views in the last year were: “Deep River Blues” (posted on April 7, 2013) and “Buck Dancer’s Choice – A Transcription” (posted on February 4, 2015).
Hmm.
Those are the only two posts in all of sixstr stories that contain a scanned reproduction of one of my handwritten transcriptions of a piece of fingerstyle guitar music.
Well, viewers, if you liked those transcriptions, here’s another!
On August 28, 2012, I wrote a post about the classic English Folk song, “The Water Is Wide.” After giving a brief history of the song, I included a link to the recording of my instrumental fingerstyle arrangement of “The Water Is Wide.” [I played it on the guitar pictured on my home page!]
Here again is that recording…
…and here is a transcription of my arrangement:
There you go!
Whenever I play “The Water Is Wide,” these are the lyrics that I hear in my head:
Verse 1) The water is wide, I can’t cross o’er, and neither have I wings to fly.
Give me a boat that can carry two and both shall row, my love and I.
Verse 2) There is a ship and she sails the sea, she’s loaded deep as deep can be.
But not so deep as the love I’m in, I know not how to sink or swim.”
If you’re a guitarist, I hope you’ll try out my arrangement. If you know a guitarist (or two) who would be interested, please share a link to this post.
I originally shared the recording of “O Holy Night” by The City of New Orleans on the occasion of sixstr stories’ first Christmas.
On December 22, 2010, I wrote:
This is my favorite recording/performance of Christmas music. Period. Hands down. No doubt. Head and shoulders above all the rest.
Back in 2006, there was a TV show called “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” on NBC. The series, by writer & director Aaron Sorkin, was about the goings on behind the scenes of a Saturday Night Live type of show. On December 4, Episode #11 aired. It was called “The Christmas Show.”
A group of displaced New Orleans musicians performed on the show-within-the-show. They were introduced as “The City of New Orleans.”
I did not mention in that “Merry Christmas” post that The City of New Orleans was a sextet: two trumpets, trombone, tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone and sousaphone.
Thanks to my son, I now know that the group’s dazzling lead trumpet player was Troy Andrews, the New Orleans-born, then-20-year-old, multi-instrumentalist also known as Trombone Shorty.
The City of New Orleans’ rendition of “O Holy Night” still stands as my all-time favorite recording/performance of Christmas music.
Acoustic fingerstyle guitarist Ed Gerhard has performed in the Seacoast New Hampshire area during the holiday season every year for the past 33 years. For most of those years, “Ed Gerhard’s Annual Christmas Guitar Concert” has been held in the beautiful sanctuary of the Unitarian Universalist Church on State Street in downtown Portsmouth.
During the late 1990’s – early 2000’s, Ed shared the stage at his Christmas Guitar Concerts with the British guitarist/singer/songwriter Martin Simpson.
My daughter and I attended several of those “Ed & Marty” shows, making it our Christmas tradition throughout her high school years. Those truly magical evenings have remained cherished holiday memories for both of us ever since.
Well, tonight – Saturday, December 19, 2015 – another precious holiday memory was made.
My daughter’s surprise early Christmas present to me was dinner together in Portsmouth and tickets for us to go to Ed’s Christmas Guitar Concert!
What an evening it was!
We enjoyed a delicious, conversation-filled meal at The Rosa on State Street and made it to the church in time to get fourth row seats.
Ed did the concert all by himself this year. The set list featured many of his outstanding arrangements of well-known Christmas classics as well as a collection of Ed’s original pieces, his equally-excellent arrangements of several John Lennon/Beatles’ songs and even a rendition of “House of the Rising Sun.” We were quite pleased that Ed also played several of our old favorites including “In The Bleak Midwinter” and “The Water Is Wide.”
Just as in all the concerts we went to way back when, tonight’s concert ended with Ed playing his arrangement of “Silent Night” and my daughter and I adding our voices as the entire audience joined in to quietly sing the best-known first verse.
On the evening of Wednesday, September 2, 2015, the weather in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was perfect: a bit more than seasonably warm and barely a cloud in the sky. Perfect for catching an outdoor concert in Portsmouth’s Prescott Park, the picturesque waterfront venue that is the annual summer home of the 41-year-old Prescott Park Arts Festival.
The headlining act that Wednesday on the Festival’s River House Restaurant Concert Series was Josh Ritter and The Royal City Band. The singer/guitarist/songwriter and his longtime back-up band were debuting songs (as in playing them live and in-public for the first time anywhere) from their recently-recorded (January 5-17, 2015, in New Orleans, LA) and soon-to-be-released (October 16, 2015) new album called Sermon On The Rocks.
I attended the concert that evening because I’d heard of Josh Ritter and because I love the Prescott Park Arts Festival. Since I didn’t know his music, every song that Josh and the outstanding Royal City Band played that night was brand new to me. But when their nearly two hour-long, thoroughly engaging and infectiously exuberant performance came to an end, I had become a most enthusiastic member of the Josh Ritter Fan Club.
Many bits and pieces of Josh Ritter’s songs danced through my head as I drove home after the show. By midnight, sitting at my desk, I’d downloaded a lengthy Josh Ritter playlist from iTunes. But one of the songs that had impressed me the most, “Homecoming,” he’d announced as being from the new album. So it wasn’t until October 17 that I was able to slip my new copy of the Sermon On The Rocks CD into my CD player, turn up the volume and immerse myself in this superb song again… and again… and again.
Listen.
I don’t remember when Josh Ritter and The Royal City Band played “Homecoming” in their set that night. I do know that right from the opening number, every song was excellent and I was soon beginning to think that I might have discovered a new favorite artist. But when Josh Ritter sang the first lines of the last verse of “Homecoming” – “The air is getting colder now, the nights are getting crisp, I first tasted the universe on a night like this” – all doubt vanished.
It was one of those rare and magical nights of music.
Everything was perfect: the weather, the place, the musicians and the songs.
To me, on a night like that, it really does feel like I’ve tasted the universe.
One of the pioneering artists in the history of Rock & Roll: singer, guitarist & songwriter Wanda Jackson, The Queen of Rockabilly.
Wanda Lavonne Jackson was born in Maud, Oklahoma on October 20, 1937. She was the daughter of Tom and Nellie Vera Jackson.
In 1954, Wanda Jackson made her first record: “You Can’t Have My Love,” a duet recorded with Country singer Billy Gray, for Decca Records. The record reached #8 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart.
Wanda was sixteen years old at the time and a student at Capitol Hill High School in Oklahoma City.
In 1955, Wanda Jackson went on tour with, and briefly dated, Elvis Presley. He encouraged her to move away from Country music and start playing and singing in the Rockabilly or Rock & Roll style that he was becoming famous for.
In 1956, Wanda Jackson signed with Capitol Records and took Elvis’ advice. “I Gotta Know” was her first single. Written by Thelma Blackmon, Wanda’s rendition of “I Gotta Know” reached #15 on the Billboard CountrySingles chart.
Listen.
There’s plenty more where that came from!
To date, the Wanda Jackson discography includes 79 singles, 31 studio albums, 4 live albums and 22 compilation albums of her work. Her latest album, Unfinished Business, came out in 2012.
On April 4, 2009, Wanda Jackson was inducted into The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as an “Early Influence.”
Doing anything this weekend?
Wanda Jackson is performing this Friday, October 23 at the “high-energy music venue” Saint Rocke in Hermosa Beach, California.
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