John H. Daum was my wife’s maternal grandfather. To Andrea and her brothers and sisters he was their Opa.
One of the earliest memories that Andrea has of her Opa comes from when she was a very little girl and her family lived on Calvin Street in Washington Township, New Jersey.
Opa and Oma (Andrea’s grandmother, Ruth Sevester Daum) had just arrived for a Sunday afternoon visit. Andrea remembers that as she excitedly dashed across the lawn to greet them, Opa stepped out of the car pretending to play the guitar and singing, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog…!” Then, after he swept her up in a big hug, still singing this silly song that Andrea had never heard before, her Opa told her about the man whose record of the song had been playing on the radio in the car, a man named Elvis Presley.
It seems that John – or Hank, as Ruth usually called him – had always been tuned in to the popular music of the day. When he was a young man, the banjo was the instrument of choice for anyone who liked to sing and wanted to accompany him/herself in style. As soon as he could afford to, John became the proud owner of a brand new Wurlitzer 4-string, tenor banjo. This handsome, open-back instrument sported friction-peg tuners with carved white (ivory?) knobs; a 17-fret, bound fingerboard; and a honey-colored, birds-eye maple rim.
For the past thirty years or so, Opa’s Banjo has lived at our house; handed down by Andrea’s mother. Every now and then I take the instrument off its shelf, carefully slide it out of its thick, black cardboard case, tune her up and plunk out an old Folk song or two from the tarnished but still lively strings.
One day in the future, Andrea and I will fulfill what we know would have been Opa’s wishes and pass the instrument on to the next generations of our/his music-loving family.
This banjo will always be Opa’s Banjo – a cherished and unique reminder of this fun-loving, warm-hearted, deeply loved and still greatly missed man.
John George Harold Daum was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on June 26, 1906. He was the first born child and only son of John and Laura (Weick) Daum. The photograph above was taken on his 75th birthday.
Opa passed away on October 26, 1990 in Stamford, Connecticut.
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born on this day, July 14, in 1912. He was the third of five children of Charley and Nora Guthrie of Okemah, OK. It wasn’t long before family and friends started calling him “Woody.”
Many years later, The Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music called songwriter, singer and guitarist Woody Guthrie: “The Dean of American Folk artists.”
Bob Dylan called him: “The true voice of the American spirit.”
In his Chronicles, Volume One (2004), Bob Dylan describes the first time he really listened to a Woody Guthrie record: “When the needle dropped, I was stunned – didn’t know if I was stoned or straight… It made me want to gasp. It was like the land parted… It was like the record player itself had just picked me up and flung me across the room…It was like I had been in the dark and someone had turned on the main switch of a lightning conductor.”
One of the Woody Guthrie records that was most likely among those that had such an impact on the young Bob Dylan was Dust Bowl Ballads.
Dust Bowl Ballads contained Woody Guthrie’s first commercial recordings. Made and released by Victor Records, the first recording session took place on April 26, 1940 in Camden, NJ. The second session was in New York City on May 3, 1940. Dust Bowl Ballads was released in July, 1940 as two, three-record albums – six, 78-rpm discs in all.
“Do Re Mi” was one of the songs on Dust Bowl Ballads. Written in 1937, Woody had previously recorded the song for Alan Lomax and The Library of Congress on March 21, 1940. He again recorded “Do Re Mi,” probably in late April, 1947 for Moses Asch and his Folkways Records. Folkways released it in 1956 on an album called Bound For Glory.
Here, in celebration of the anniversary of Woody Guthrie’s birthday, is his Asch recording of “Do Re Mi.”
On Saturday, August 18, 1962, at Hulme Hall in Port Sunlight, Birkenhead, England, Ringo Starr played his first official gig as the drummer for The Beatles.
Part of what made Ringo the perfect person for the job was his voice. Before long, John, Paul & George regularly turned the spotlight over to this very entertaining singer for a song during a show.
“Boys,” originally written by Luther Dixon & Wes Farrell for the American group, The Shirelles, became the “drummer’s number.” Ringo’s live performance of the song was so well-received in concert, that the band recorded it for their first album, “Please Please Me,” in February, 1963.
From then on, just about every Beatles album included a song – some written by John & Paul, some not – where Ringo sang the lead.
For instance…
“I Wanna Be Your Man” was “the drummer’s number” on With The Beatles.
Two songs by Carl Perkins, “Matchbox” and “Honey Don’t,” appeared respectively on the 1964 American LP, Something New and the 1964 British LP, Beatles For Sale.
Help (1965) included “Act Naturally,” a 1963 hit for American Country Music star, Buck Owens.
The second side of the British version of Rubber Soul (1965) started with “What Goes On.”
“Yellow Submarine” added some fun to Revolver in 1966.
Ringo sang as the fictional Billy Shears in “With A Little Help From My Friends” on Sgt. Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967.
Finally, in 1968, Ringo added “songwriter” to his resume.
“Don’t Pass Me By,” Ringo’s first all-original song, was the sixth track on the second side of the two-LP set simply called TheBeatles.
Credited to Richard Starkey (Ringo’s real name), “Don’t Pass Me By” was recorded over four recording sessions starting on June 5, 1968 and concluding on July 22, 1968. The track features Ringo on vocals, drums, sleigh bell and piano – with Paul McCartney on piano and bass guitar and Jack Fallon on violin/fiddle.
“Don’t Pass Me By” is great fun to sing, play and listen to!
Here it is! (Feel free to sing along!)
Richard Starkey – he took on “Ringo Starr” as his stage name a couple of years before he became a Beatle -was born this day, July 7, 1940 in Liverpool, England.
Happy 74th Birthday wishes with Peace and Love to you Ringo!
This past Spring, two of my best guitar students, N and A, learned the song “Ain’t No Sunshine” by Bill Withers.
N, the singer/guitarist of this very talented duo was inspired to learn “Ain’t No Sunshine” from a YouTube video of John Mayer’s live 2010 cover version of the song. A, the lead guitarist, wanted to be able to play the melody of the first verse of this 1971 Grammy Award-winning “Best R&B Song” just the way Bill Withers sings it in this live performance from 1971.
Individually and together, I coached these two young musicians through the process of creating an acoustic guitar, vocals & electric guitar arrangement that combined the best of John Mayer’s and Bill Withers’ versions. In the end, N and A were the proud purveyors of a superb rendition of “Ain’t No Sunshine” that will stand as my favorite cover of this timeless R&B classic.
When I shared this story with my wife Andrea, I added that I’d forgotten not only what a good song “Ain’t No Sunshine” was but what a really fine singer Bill Withers was. Andrea readily agreed and went on to tell me how and why her all-time favorite Bill Withers song is “Lean On Me.”
Here, in this blog’s first ever contribution from a “Special Guest Writer” is Andrea’s own sixstr story:
“We all need somebody to lean on…”
Bill Withers sang those words to me over and over. And I sang along with him. Back and forth to high school graduation practice in my parents’ red Chrysler – the car radio blasting – 77 WABC – my favorite AM station for many years. Or driving to the Grand Union, Westwood Cleaners, running errands for my mother….bringing my brothers or sisters somewhere. At 18 I had many worries, but Bill Withers and his Top Ten hit “Lean On Me” kept me company – his words and smooth, smooth voice were soothing. The song begins with piano, then soft humming, then his voice wrapping you up in a hug with its messages of hope and help and friendship….and of course that gentle beat you can’t help but move with. The soft clapping. It was just what my 18 year old self needed to hear…over and over.
However, even now – all these years later – when I hear those first few notes, I am back there – in that old car with the radio on and the sense that my life is about to drastically change. And how I sure did need somebody to lean on.
Happy Birthday Mr. Withers. Your song made a difference in my life. I still remember every word.
After that dinnertime conversation, I discovered that the only Bill Withers recording that we owned was a vinyl copy of his 1977 LP, Menagerie. Andrea then did some online research and placed an order to Bull Moose Records in Portsmouth for a copy of the 2000 Columbia/Legacy compilation, The Best of Bill Withers: Lean On Me.
A few days later, we were savoring the luxurious sounds of “Lovely Day,” “Grandma’s Hands,” “Use Me,” “Just The Two Of Us,” “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Lean On Me” and twelve other outstanding Bill Withers songs.
In the course of her research, Andrea learned that July 4 was Bill Withers’ birthday. “You’ll have to do a blog post,” she exclaimed.
“Good idea,” I replied.
William Harrison Withers, Jr. was born in Slab Fork, West Virginia on July 4, 1938. Bill was the youngest of six children.
Bill Withers recorded his first album, Just As I Am (containing “Ain’t No Sunshine”) in 1971. He went on to record seven more albums, the last being Watching You Watching Me, which came out in 1985.
“Lean On Me” was from Bill Withers’ second album, Still Bill, which was released in May of 1972. “Lean On Me” held the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart for three weeks in a row, starting the week of July 8, 1972.
There are some songwriters who come up with a title first, then write the song to go with it. This song is the only song I ever wrote that way. The title was a typo.
Back in the Fall of 2003, I received a brochure in the mail for an upcoming concert series at a nearby venue. On the page of the brochure with the information about how one could order tickets to a show, there was a careful explanation that “members” would be given first choice of seats, those buying season tickets would be next in line and then “remaining seas” would be available to the general public after such and such a date.
“Remaining seas.”
Hmm.
Here’s what I came up with.
(If you’re new to this, click on the blue line below – it is a link to a recording of the song – and… wait for it!)
Disc records were commercially produced starting in 1901. In 1910, a diameter of ten inches was established as the standard size and in 1925, the playing speed of 78 revolutions per minute became the norm. These mediums for analog sound storage, now known as “78’s,” were thick and heavy and made of a brittle, shellac-based compound.
The “LP” (long-playing) record was introduced by Columbia Records in June of 1948.
This new record was made of polyvinyl chloride, measured 12 inches in diameter and was meant to be played at a speed of 33 and 1/3 rpm. The lightweight, somewhat-flexible vinyl disc was inscribed with a spiral groove that was only .003 inches wide. This new “microgroove technology” allowed for up to 22 1/2 minutes of music to be stored on each side of the disc.
Since a 78 could contain only about 3 1/2 minutes of music per side, the longer playing time of the new LP became one of its major selling points.
In February, 1949, RCA (Radio Corporation of America) Records introduced the 7-inch, 45-rpm record that became known as the “single.”
This new disc was also made of vinyl and used microgroove technology. RCA proclaimed that the faster playing speed made for a better sounding record than the 33 1/3 rpm LP, even though the “45” could hold only the same amount of music per side as a 78.
In 1952, RCA took the 7-inch, 45-rpm record one step further by figuring out how to fit up to 7 1/2 minutes of music per side. This “extended play” disc became known as the EP.
EP’s were very popular in the United Kingdom throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s. They were not so popular in the United States and thus not so easy to obtain, but nevertheless, I have three EP’s in my record collection.
The first EP that I purchased was called Four By The Beatles.
Released on May 11, 1964, it was one of only two Beatles’ EP’s produced by Capitol Records in the US. (In the UK, EMI records released a total of 21 EP’s of music by The Beatles. Four By the Beatles was the 7th.) Side one contains “Roll Over Beethoven” and “This Boy.” Side two holds “All My Loving” and “Please, Mr. Postman.” All four tracks are studio recordings; two of them are The Beatles’ cover versions of songs by American R&B artists.
The second EP that I added to my collection was got LIVE if you want it! by The Rolling Stones.
Released on June 11, 1965 by England’s Decca Records, the EP contains six “live, in-concert” recordings. “We Want The Stones,” “Everybody Needs Somebody To Love,” “Pain In My Heart” and “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66” fill up side one. “I’m Moving On” and “I’m Alright” take up side two. Four of these are The Stones’ cover versions of songs by American artists. I heard the version of “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66” from this EP one night in a record store in Cambridge, MA and just had to have it.
The last EP I bought was The Pink Parker by Graham Parker & The Rumour.
Released in the UK in early 1977, the EP followed hot on the heels of the band’s second LP – and my favorite – Heat Treatment. (That album came out in October, 1976.)
The Pink Parker contains two studio tracks – recorded “somewhere in Germany” – on side one: “Hold Back The Night” and “(Let Me Get) Sweet On You.” Side two has live recordings of “White Honey” and “Soul Shoes,” songs from Graham Parker & The Rumour’s first album, Howling Wind (July 1976).
The Pink Parker was a Top-30 hit on the British charts in March, 1977.
“Hold Back The Night” is a song originally written and recorded by The Trammps – an American Disco/Soul band that were together from 1973 to 1980. Originally released in 1973, “Hold Back The Night” became an international hit upon its re-release in 1975. The Trammps are best known for their song “Disco Inferno” thanks to its inclusion in the soundtrack to the movie Saturday Night Fever.
Graham Parker & The Rumour’sjoyous cover version of this lyrically rather sad and despondent song is high on my list of “you absolutely cannot resist dancing around the living room when this one’s playing” records.
Check it out for yourself!
The musicians on that recording are: Graham Parker, lead vocals; Bob Andrews, keyboards & backing vocals; Brinsley Schwarz, guitar & backing vocals; Stephen Goulding, drums; Andrew Bodnar, bass guitar; Martin Belmont, guitar & backing vocals; and special guest, Thin Lizzy guitarist Brian Robertson.
Recently rediscovering this EP and the Heat Treatment LP has reminded me what a big fan of Graham Parker & The Rumour I had been back in my younger days.
I fondly remember the night – Sunday, October 23, 1977, to be precise – when my girlfriend (now wife) and I hopped into my 1972 Karmann Ghia and drove from our apartment in downtown Exeter, NH to a concert at the Orpheum Theater in Boston, MA. Graham Parker & The Rumour were the opening act for Thin Lizzy, a British band riding high on their hit song, “The Boy’s Are Back In Town.” After Graham Parker & The Rumour’s exultant, rocking-to-the-rafters, 45 minute set, we left and quite contentedly drove home.
Ah, records… and cover versions… and British Rock & Roll bands…
In the summer of 1970, I bought my first guitar – a chocolate-brown Harmony steel-string acoustic – and a songbook: Ramblin’ Boy and other songs by Tom Paxton.
The only song in that slender 1964 Oak Publications publication that I recognized was on page 38-39, in the chapter titled Children’s Songs. The song was “My Dog’s Bigger Than Your Dog.”
Here’s why I knew it.
That 1964 Ken-L-Ration dog food commercial ran so often that anyone (including my then-10-year-old self) who watched TV at all back then soon had “My dog’s better than your dog…” permanently ingrained in his/her brain. I’d never thought about who wrote the song until I bought that Tom Paxton songbook.
Tom Paxton recorded the song in 1962 on his first LP, I’m The Man That Built The Bridges. The album was an independently produced collection of live recordings done at the Gaslight Cafe in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
Here’s “My Dog’s Bigger…” from that album.
Having learned “My Dog’s Bigger Than Your Dog” from the transcription in Mr. Paxton’s songbook, I found the Gaslight Cafe recording rather surprising the first time I listened to it. Where were all the verses?
In the songbook, there are eight verses, arranged in pairs. The second of each pair is an “Answering Verse” to the first, like two kids going back and forth, trying to one-up each other.
“My dog’s bigger…” is answered with “My dog’s better…” (“His name is King and he had puppies”)
“My Dad’s tougher…” is answered with “My Dad’s louder…”
“Our car’s faster…” is answered with “Our car’s older…” (“It stops running and Daddy kicks the fenders.”)
“My Mom’s older…” (“She takes smelly baths, she hides the gray hairs.”) is answered with “My Mom’s funnier…”
I loved those verses and whenever I would perform the song, I’d sing all of them, doing a different “voice” for each “kid.”
Mr. Paxton did not record “My Dog’s Bigger Than Your Dog” again until 1974 when he recorded an album called The Tom Paxton Children’s Songbook for a British record company. (This album was released stateside in 1984 by Flying Fish Records and re-titled The Marvelous Toy & Other Gallimaufry.)
In the 1974 version, Mr. Paxton again only sings four of the verses, one of each pair, and the chorus. (“I’m not afraid of the dark anymore, I can tie my shoes…”) He also adds a kid-like “nyah, nyah” in two places and changes the Dad of the second verse from being “meaner” to being “tougher.”
Just to let you know, neither of these recordings of “My Dog’s Bigger Than Your Dog” is among the hundreds of songs/recordings by Tom Paxton that are available on iTunes! I was only able to find them as soundtracks to videos on YouTube.
A search of iTunes for the song (by its title) did produce two cover versions of “My Dog’s Bigger Than Your Dog.” One was by Folk singer Peter Morse and the other by the duo of Leroy Inman & Ira Rogers.
Mr. Morse’s version follows Mr. Paxton’s arrangement but, to my delight, the Inman & Rogers version – from an album released in March 2012, called The New FolkGeneration – contains all eight verses (with only a few slight changes from the original, Ramblin’ Boy and other songs by… lyrics)! Hooray!!
One final note on “My Dog’s Bigger Than Your Dog.”
For some reason, when I taught myself how to play the song all those years ago, I made a rather substantial change to the chorus: I doubled the length of the rhythmic value of every note of the melody. What that means is: I sing every one beat, 1/4 note as a two beat, 1/2 note; every half-beat 1/8 note as a full-beat, 1/4 note. So, when I listen to Tom Paxton and Leroy Inman & Ira Rogers sing the song, the chorus sounds very rushed and rather diminished.
P.S.: This post was inspired by and is dedicated to Lutra, the newest member of our family. Lutra is the Texas-born, black lab/german shepherd puppy adopted on June 1, 2014 by my daughter and son-in-law down in Washington, D.C.
This quote caught my ear on the Saturday, January 25, 2014 broadcast of the long-running, Boston-based NPR sports show It’s Only A Game, hosted by Bill Littlefield.
The piece was by reporter Doug Tribou and it was called “Fans Hedge Super Bowl Ticket Hopes On Team’s Success.” A gentleman named Rick Harmon, the chairman of the company Forward Market Media, said:
“The fact of the matter is that we and all the rest of the people on this good Earth of ours spend hugely greater amounts of time anticipating things than actually doing things.”
“As I Went Out One Morning” is a Bob Dylan song. It is the second song on John Wesley Harding, Dylan’s eighth album.
Written and recorded in the Fall of 1967, the John Wesley Harding LP followed Dylan’s BlondeOn Blonde, a double album released in May, 1966. In a broader historical context, John Wesley Harding was created five months after the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and two months after the death of Woody Guthrie.
According to Brian Hinton’s 2006 book, Bob Dylan Complete Discography, Dylan intended John Wesley Harding to be “an album of songs.” Hinton quotes from a 1968 interview that Dylan gave to Jann Wenner, then of Rolling Stone magazine. Dylan described the approach to songwriting that he started taking with the songs on John Wesley Harding: “What I’m trying to do now is not use too many words. There’s no line that you can stick your finger through. There’s no blank filler. Each line has something.”
The results?
Blonde On Blonde contains 14 songs – 9 of which are over 4 minutes long – and has a total running time of 73 minutes. John Wesley Harding contains 12 songs – only two are over 4 minutes long – and has a total running time of just under 39 minutes.
Clinton Heylin, writing in his 1995 book Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions [1960-1994], claims that John Wesley Harding is “Dylan’s most perfectly executed album.”
Of the twelve songs on John Wesley Harding, Brian Hinton puts “As I Went Out One Morning” among the ten which Dylan once described as having been “written out on paper, and I found the tunes for them later,” then adding, in reference to this method: “I didn’t do it before, and I haven’t done it since.”
Lyrically, “As I Went Out One Morning” is a ballad. Its three, eight-line verses present a first-person account of the events of an initially innocent morning stroll.
(Let me see if I can do this Harry Smith/Anthology of American Folk Music-style: “Man taking a walk encounters beautiful-but-desperate young woman with questionable intentions. Man is quickly and aggressively rescued by apologetic land owner.”)
Musically, Dylan sets the lyrics to a 4/4-time melody in the key of F#m, harmonized by a 23-measure, four chord progression. There are four phrases to the complete melodic line – which repeats with each verse – and the melodic curve soars to its penultimate note in the third phrase, brilliantly highlighting the lyric each time it comes around. (Verse 3, for instance: “As she was letting go her grip…, up Tom Paine did run.”)
“As I Went Out One Morning” was recorded in Nashville, Tennessee at Columbia Records’ Music Row Studios on November 6, 1967. Bob Johnson was the producer. This was the second of the three recording sessions that were needed to complete John Wesley Harding.
Bob Dylan sings and plays acoustic guitar and harmonica on the track. He is accompanied by bassist Charlie McCoy and drummer Kenneth Buttrey.
Specifically, on the recording of “As I Went Out One Morning,” Dylan plays his acoustic guitar capoed at the fourth fret, allowing him to finger the chords in the key of D-minor. (The chords he uses are thus: Dm, C, F and Am. I have always liked the sound of playing it with my guitar capoed at the second fret and fingering Em, D, G and Bm.)
Even in a collection that includes “All Along The Watchtower,” “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” “As I Went Out One Morning” stands tall; a shinning, perfectly polished gem of a song. It amazes me that, according to one source, Dylan has rarely performed the song in concert.
If Bob Dylan’s original recording was available, I’d have an embedded link right here for you to click on and listen to. There are several cover versions of “As I Went Out One Morning” by a variety of artists posted on YouTube, but after careful listening, I decided that not even one of them could hold a candle to Dylan’s presentation of this truly remarkable song.
So, you’ll just have to buy it – buy the whole album! – to find out for yourself.
P.S.: Yesterday, May 24, 2014, was Bob Dylan’s 73rd birthday.
The first part of this post is a replay of a piece I wrote on May 11, 2010 under the title Yesterday In Music History. I’ve added the section about “Wildwood Flower” and an embedded YouTube “video” featuring the Carter Family’s original recording for your listening pleasure.
“She’d hook that right thumb under that big bass string and just like magic the other fingers moved fast like a threshing machine, always on the right strings, and out came the lead notes and the accompaniment at the same time. The left hand worked in perfect timing, and the frets seemed to pull those nimble fingers to the very place where they were supposed to be, and the guitar rang clear and sweet with a mellow touch that made you know it was Maybelle playing the guitar.”
That was June Carter Cash describing her mother, Maybelle Carter, playing the guitar.
Maybelle Addington Carter was born on May 10, 1909 in Nicklesville, Virginia. While still a teenager, she played guitar and sang back-up in a trio with Sara Carter, her cousin, and A.P.Carter, Sara’s husband. Sara sang lead and played autoharp and guitar. A.P. sang bass. The group was known as the Carter Family.
On August 1, 1927, in Bristol, Tennessee, the Carter Family made their first recordings for Ralph Peer, a traveling talent scout for Victor Records. From then until 1943, when A.P. and Sara left the group, the Carter Family recorded hundreds of songs and sold millions of records.
Thanks to those records and several years of live radio broadcasts, Maybelle’s guitar style, her “Carter Scratch,” was heard all over the country and adopted by generations of guitar players.
To try to put the extent and importance of her influence simply:
Maybelle Carter was Woody Guthrie’s favorite guitar player.
Woody Guthrie was one of the primary influences of Bob Dylan.
And who did Bob Dylan influence?
Well, as a student said when I posed that question in class one day:
“Everyone.”
Maybelle Carter passed away on October 23, 1978.
The Carter Family recorded “Wildwood Flower” for Victor Records on May 10, 1928 in Camden, N.J., in the Trinity Baptist Church. In the photo below, that’s Maybelle on the left, holding her big Gibson guitar. Sara Carter, the vocalist on “Wildwood Flower,” is seated on the right. A.P. Carter is in the middle. On the recording, 19-year-old Maybelle plays the guitar during the introduction and throughout this famous song.
sixstr stories 