In 1961, Columbia Records released an album called The King of the Delta Blues Singers. The album, conceived by the legendary Columbia talent scout and record producer John Hammond (1910-1987), was a compilation of recordings originally made in 1936 and 1937 for Vocalion Records by a Mississippi-based Blues musician named Robert Johnson.
One of the sixteen songs on The King of the Delta Blues Singers (Side 1, track 3) was a number called “Come On In My Kitchen.” The hypnotic performance featured Johnson’s dazzling slide guitar playing behind his intense and passionate vocals.
“Come On In My Kitchen” was recorded on November 23, 1936 at Johnson’s first recording session, held at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas.
On The King of the Delta Blues Singers, Robert Johnson was given songwriting credit for “Come On In My Kitchen.” But where the lyrics are definitely original, the melody had been around for some time.
The melody dates back as far as 1925 and a song called “How Long Daddy How Long” by Ida Cox. Subsequent songs by Tampa Red (“Things ‘Bout Coming My Way,” 1934), The Mississippi Sheiks (“Sitting On Top Of The World,” 1930), Blind Blake (“Depression’s Gone From Me Blues,” 1931) and others made use of the same tune.
Though each artist put his or her personal stamp on the rendering of this melody, no one, before or since, sang it quite like Robert Johnson did.
Robert Leroy Johnson was born this day, May 8, 1911 in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. He passed away under mysterious circumstances on August 16, 1938.
That’s how long it has been since I wrote my first post – “Hello, World” – and established a quote from Jelly Roll Morton – “Good music doesn’t get old” – as the official motto of this adventure I call sixstr stories.
During those four years, the archives of sixstr stories has grown to contain 254 posts. Those posts are accessible by month as well as through one (or more) of nine different categories. In 2013 I introduced a new category that I’m excited about and planning to do more with: QuotationsMarked.
The total number of reader comments generated by all of those posts has reached 272.
As of this morning, the total number of “views” of sixstr stories has reached well beyond the 15,000 mark. The past year saw sixstr stories’ “best ever” viewing day with my July 14, 2013 post about Jazz pianist Tommy Gallant. That one welcomed 121 visitors.
Before I get the party started, please allow me to extend my heartfelt thanks and gratitude to you, each and every one of you, who visit, follow, read, listen to and comment on my musings and enthusiasms here at sixstr stories.
In celebration of this anniversary, I offer a bit of (to me) newly-discovered music.
On July 16, 1958, Jazz organist Jimmy Smith along with baritone saxophonist Cecil Payne, electric guitarist Kenny Burrell and drummers Art Blakey and Donald Bailey gathered at the Van Gelder Recording Studio in Hackensack, New Jersey to lay down some Blues.
Five of the six pieces the quartets recorded that day were not released until 1999 when Blue Note Records put them all together on a CD called Six Views Of The Blues.
I picked up my copy – because I love Jimmy Smith and Kenny Burrell – this past Wednesday at the Newbury Comics store at the North Shore Shopping Center in Peabody, MA.
For your listening and dancing pleasure – I dare you to sit still – I present to you Track #5 from that album, the appropriately-titled: “Blues No. 4”
Donald Bailey is the drummer on this cut and, after the band plays the Jimmy Smith-composed “head,” guitarist Kenny Burrell takes the first solo. Oh, boy!
This may be a long piece of music, but it is 10 minutes and 54 seconds of absolutely joyous music making. You won’t be disappointed.
On Sundays, I like to listen to music when I do my morning exercise routine. (On weekdays, I listen to the news on NPR via NHPR.)
Lately, I’ve been listening my way through an album I found on iTunes a few months back called Musical History Of America. The 57-track collection was released in October, 2009 by Masters Classics Records. I was intrigued by its inclusion of a wide variety of the expected artists – Bessie Smith, Blind Willie McTell, Duke Ellington and Woody Guthrie, for example – along with several that were new to me: Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith, The Gidden Sisters and Lydia Mendoza, to name a few.
This past Sunday, after a fine Sister Rosetta Tharpe song called “Rock Daniel,” I was struck by an outstanding acoustic guitar and vocals number that was equal parts Blues and Country with some very hot guitar solos.
“Whoa!,” I thought, as the song concluded. “Who was that?”
After I’d finished my exercises, I scrolled back on my iPod and found that track #21 was Sam McGee playing “Railroad Blues.”
Sam McGee? That name sounds familiar. Time to do some research.
In the reference section of my library I have a treasure chest of a book called “Country Music Originals – The Legends and The Lost” by Tony Russell.
Over breakfast, I took a look.
Sure enough, there was a chapter on Sam McGee (1894-1975). The chapter starts: “Sam McGee recorded country music’s first guitar instrumentals. The fact is unarguable, a matter of historical record in both senses.”
Now, that’s my kind of fact.
Mr. Russell identified those instrumentals, recorded “in a New York studio” by “the quiet farmer from Franklin, Tennessee,” as “Buck Dancer’s Choice” and “The Franklin Blues.”
One of the best features of Mr. Russell’s book is that each chapter concludes with a “Playlist.” This box provides the interested reader with a list of CDs that feature or include recordings by the chapter’s artist or group. According to the Sam McGee playlist, both of those instrumentals were on a County Records CD – #3512 – titled Old-Time Mountain Guitar.
“Really?,” I thought. “I own a copy of that CD!”
A quick look through my meticulously organized CD library and there it was: Old-Time Mountain Guitar: Vintage Recordings 1926-1931, compiled and released in 1998 by County Records in Floyd, Virginia.
Track #2 was “Buck Dancer’s Choice” and track #9 was “The Franklin Blues.” The track listings identified Sam McGee as the guitarist with “spoken comments by Uncle Dave Macon” and stated the two pieces were “recorded April 14, 1926 in New York City, NY.”
I felt a blog post coming on.
Here, thanks to the never-ending wonders of YouTube, are those two pieces: the first Country music guitar instrumentals ever recorded, eighty-eight years to the day later.
In the photo that accompanies “Buck Dancer’s Choice,” that’s Sam McGee on the right holding the guitar and his brother, Kirk, on the left.
Later on that Sunday, I finally remembered why the name Sam McGee was initially so familiar to me.
Many years ago I bought two books of transcriptions of fingerstyle acoustic guitar music put together by musician Happy Traum. One of them was Fingerpicking Styles for Guitar, released in 1966 by Oak Publcations. I owned a copy of the “revised and updated edition” that came out in 1980.
On page 39 of the slim volume, there is a short bio and a photo (by David Gahr) of Sam McGee.
Mr. Traum wrote: “Sam McGee and his brother, Kirk, sang and played old-time string music for over forty years. Their exuberance and good humor made them one of the Grand Ole Opry’s most popular acts.”
Starting in 1926, Sam and Kirk were members of Uncle Dave Macon’s Fruit Jar Drinkers and, in 1931, formed The Dixieliners with Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith. In 1957, with the help of Folk musician Mike Seeger, the McGee Brothers and Arthur Smith reunited. For the next several years, the trio set off on a rejuvenated career of recording and performing; highlighted by a well-received appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
On pages 40-41 of Fingerpicking Styles for Guitar there was a transcription of “Buck Dancer’s Choice,” taken from a version of the piece that appeared on a 1964 Folkways recording titled The McGee Brothers and Arthur Smith. The album is now called Look! Who’s Here: Old Timers of the Grand Ole Opry on the Smithsonian Folkways label.
On this day, April 10, in 1970, a British newspaper, the Evening Standard, published an interview with Paul McCartney conducted by journalist Peter Brown.
The piece contained this exchange.
Peter Brown: “Have you (The Beatles) any plans for live appearances?”
Paul McCartney: “No.”
Peter Brown: “Is your break with The Beatles temporary or permanent, due to personal differences or musical ones?”
Paul McCartney: “Personal differences, business differences, but most of all because I have a better time with my family. Temporary or permanent? I don’t know.”
Peter Brown: “Do you foresee a time when Lennon-McCartney becomes an active songwriting partnership again?”
Paul McCartney: “No.”
On April 17, 1970, Apple Records released McCartney, Paul’s first solo album.
In October, 1976, the then-32-year-old Texas Blues-Rocker Johnny Winter had a dream come true: he recorded and produced an album with his hero, the legendary Chicago Blues singer/guitarist Muddy Waters. The album – Muddy’s 12th studio album – was called Hard Again. It was released on Blue Sky Records on January 10, 1977.
In an article that appeared in the March 1994 issue of Guitar Player magazine, author Jas Obrecht quotes Johnny Winter explaining his approach to the creation of Hard Again: “My whole thing was to make the record that Muddy wanted to make with the musicians he wanted to work with. He was the boss.”
The musicians that Winter and Waters gathered for the recording sessions, most of whom had worked with Muddy many times before, were: James Cotton, harmonica; “Pine Top” Perkins, piano; Bob Margolin, guitar; Charles Calmese, bass guitar; and Willie “Big Eyes” Smith, drums. Muddy Waters sang and played guitar while Johnny Winter added his guitar and “miscellaneous screaming.”
In an interview that appeared in the August 1983 issue of Guitar Player, Muddy Waters described the way the sessions worked this way: “We didn’t practice. We just got in there, and we’d run over a song and put it down. We caught it. The whole album took two days. We would’ve been done before, but Johnny would get tired and say, ‘Well, let’s come back tomorrow.'”
Johnny explained: “I couldn’t believe how he was running me ragged. The studio was downstairs and the control room was upstairs, and I was running back and forth saying to myself, ‘God damn, Muddy, you’re gonna kill me.’ I figured we’d play about four hours, take a break, and work some more. But Muddy said, ‘No, I don’t want to take no break, man!’ It was one song after another, and they kept getting better and better.”
The first track on Hard Again was “Mannish Boy.”
Written by Muddy Waters, Mel London and Bo Diddley, “Mannish Boy” had been a hit for Muddy in 1955 on Chess Records. The song is built on a short, five note, stop-time figure or riff played over and over by the whole band. Muddy sings, moans, shouts and exclaims during, around and in response to this riff.
The 1955 recording clocks in at two minutes and fifty-five seconds. The version on Hard Again lasts for five minutes and twenty-three seconds and that riff is repeated eighty-five times. (Yes, I counted.)
You absolutely have to hear this recording. I promise you won’t be disappointed.
OK?
Sit back, take a deep breath and check it out.
Right?
The other eight tracks on Hard Again are just as passionate and joyous and hard-driving as that one. Highly recommended.
Muddy Waters was born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi on this day, April 4, in 1915. His birth name was McKinley Morganfield. He was the second son of sharecropper Ollie Morganfield and Bertha Jones. Muddy passed away peacefully in his sleep on April 30, 1983.
“Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah…
Everything, everything, everything’s gonna be alright this morning!
It’s been a while since I posted a piece of my music for your listening pleasure.
So, here’s a guitar instrumental that I came up with a few years back, inspired by the music and playing of Elizabeth Cotten, Doc Watson and John Fahey.
I called the piece “Home Alone” because I had the house to myself on the afternoon that I created it. I recorded it on a Sony cassette tape deck in my “home studio” on November 9, 2008.
In Boston, Massachusetts, at the Museum of Fine Arts, there is a gallery – #103 – devoted to musical instruments. (The gallery – it’s hanging sign and heavy glass door, both proclaiming: “Musical Instruments” – is located just inside the Museum’s Huntington Avenue entrance, off the right hand hallway that leads to the Rotunda.)
In the back of the Musical Instrument gallery is a tall, glass display case containing three very cool, very old guitars.
The oldest of the three guitars is the one on the right in the picture below.
That guitar was built in 1628 by Jacopo Checchucci in Livorno, Italy.
Jacopo built this 10-string guitar (5 pairs of strings, each pair called a “course”) out of spruce (for the front or “top”), ebony and ivory (for the sides, back and decorative trim). The strings and the frets – which are tied around the neck – are made of gut (yes, that would be from an animal) and inside the sound hole is an ornamental rosette made of “delicately cut pieces of parchment.”
The guitar on the left in the picture above was made in 1725.
This instrument, also known as a “chitarra battente,” was built by Jacopo Mosca-Cavelli in Perugia, Italy. The luthier used bloodwood, spruce, pearl and tortoiseshell for this guitar and strung it with fourteen metal strings. The strings are arranged in five courses, four of the courses containing three strings, and one course with just two strings. This is a very unusual instrument!
The third guitar in the case, the one in the center, is shown in the picture below.
This guitar was built by Nicholas Alexandre Voboam II in 1680 in Paris, France.
Nicholas built this nine string guitar – four double courses, one single string – out of red cedar, spruce, ebony and ivory (especially noticeable in the “roped” edging all around the top of the instrument). The strings are made of gut and the bridge – where the strings connect to the top – is in a design known as a “moustache.”
You can see the back of this instrument in the center of the first picture. In the second picture, the striped back of the Mosca-Cavelli instrument is on the right, and the highly-decorated back of the Checchucci instrument on the left.
For reference sake, the first guitars manufactured in America were made in 1833 in New York City by Christian Frederick Martin. (Christian was born in Markneukirchen, Germany in 1796.)
The world of guitars is a vast, wonderful and fascinating place.
One hundred years ago today, on March 8, 1914, my Mother was born.
Avis Louise was the first born of the six children of George P. and Stella (Libby) Foss. Growing up in Center Strafford, New Hampshire, Avis went to high school at Austin Cate Academy. She played cello in the school orchestra and center for the girl’s basketball team. Avis graduated from Austin Cate in 1932.
Avis had been accepted to next attend Plymouth (N.H.) State College where she hoped to major in Physical Education, but for some reason her parents could not afford the tuition and she had to turn down her acceptance. Instead, Avis attended the Exeter (N.H.) Hospital Training School for Nurses. Nursing students paid for their room, board and tuition by working shifts at Exeter Hospital between their classes and study hours. Somehow and somewhere along the way, she also learned to play the piano.
Avis graduated from the Exeter Hospital Training School in 1936. Not long after, she moved to Orlando, Florida, where she worked for about a year, living with her half-sister, Marion Brown and Marion’s husband, Harley. Eventually, Avis returned to Exeter, where she met my Father.
In May of 1941, Avis Louise Foss married Francis Matthew Sinclair. Because Avis was not a Roman Catholic (as Francis was), the small wedding ceremony was held in the living room of the priest’s house, next door to St. Michael’s Church, in Exeter.
Professionally, Avis loved being a nurse. She was justifiably proud to have passed the state board exams and earned the distinction of being a Registered Nurse. She was employed as an RN at Exeter Hospital for many years and was honored to be among the small group of nurses chosen to work in the hospital’s first Recovery Room.
Personally, Avis and Francis were trying to start a family. After much heartbreak and with thanks to one of the doctors that she worked with at Exeter Hospital who suggested that she get her thyroid checked, Avis finally became a mother in August of 1953.
Avis Louise Foss Sinclair was thirty-nine years old. I would be her only child.
My Mother really loved her family and being a mother.
From the earliest times that I can remember, my Mother supported and encouraged me in whatever I wanted to do. When, at the age of ten, I first expressed an interest in playing music, she gave me my first snare drum and cymbal and arranged for me to take drum lessons. When my seriousness in this endeavor was firmly established, she helped me in purchasing my first complete drum set.
When I was in high school, my Mother was quite pleased when I took up the guitar. I soon started writing my own songs and eventually doing some performing. As supportive as they both were, neither of my parents were quite sure what to say when I told them that this performing thing was what I wanted to study in college and eventually do for a living. But when I ultimately announced during my sophomore year at the University of New Hampshire that I had decided that I wanted to be a music teacher and do my singing, guitar playing, songwriting and performing “on the side,” both of my parents, though my Mother especially, were thrilled and quite relieved.
All throughout those years however, from seventh grade through college, my Mother frequently allowed me to turn her living room into a rehearsal space for whatever band or ensemble I was playing with at the time. The bass guitarist in my college trio (who is still a good friend and occasional bandmate) has many fond memories of the dinners my mother served up on the evenings we’d rehearse at the house on Newfields Road.
In the years ahead, my Mother found that she also loved being a mother-in-law. And then, when the time arrived, she absolutely reveled in being “Nana” to her granddaughter and grandson. My Mother gifted her grandchildren with many precious memories and experiences that they cherish to this day.
My Mother suffered a slow and tragic decline of her health over the last six years of her life. With a mere shadow remaining of the woman we all loved so much, Avis Louise Foss Sinclair passed away on Sunday, August 5, 2001. She was eighty-seven years old.
As my Mother would always say, “God love you!”
Happy 100th Birthday, Mom! You’d have been a great centenarian.
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