This Historic Day… My Mother

Posted on March 8, 2011 by sixstrstories

Avis Louise Foss Sinclair, my Mother, was born on this day, March 8, in the year 1914.

She was the daughter of George P. and Stella Foss and grew up in Center Strafford, NH. In 1932, she graduated from Austin Cate Academy, Center Strafford’s high school, where she played cello in the school orchestra and center for the girl’s basketball team. In 1936, she graduated from the Exeter (NH) Hospital Training School for Nurses.

In May of 1941, she married my Father, Francis M. Sinclair, in Exeter, NH.

My Mother was very supportive of my musical endeavors, even in my junior high and early high school years when I played the drums. (It has been said that the mother of a young rock & roll drummer deserves sainthood.) When I became a performing singer/guitarist/songwriter, my Mother and my Father would often come to my gigs, especially when I used to play on Sunday afternoons, outside, at Applecrest Farms in Hampton Falls, NH.

One of my Mother’s favorite songs of mine was “The Ladies of Fairburn.” I recorded and released “Ladies” on my first full-length, cassette-tape album, “Anytime,” in 1988.

Around that time, an Exeter-based AM radio station started a weekend-mornings Folk music show, with a DJ named Rick Parry. I’d listened to Rick through high school when he was on WBCN-FM, out of Boston. Rick was a big supporter of all of the Seacoast NH Folk musicians, readily giving them airplay and promoting up-coming gigs.

When I told my Mother about the radio show and that they had a copy of “Anytime,” and that the DJ took requests from listeners, that’s all she needed to know. She started to call the station on a weekly basis and request “The Ladies of Fairburn” and Rick always played it, even after he figured out who she was. This went on for many months.

So, in honor of her birthday, here it is.

“The Ladies of Fairburn” – words, music, guitar and vocals by Eric Sinclair

The violist is Anne Black.

My Mother passed away on August 5, 2001.

Miss her.

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The First Jazz Record

Posted on March 4, 2011 by sixstrstories

Since one of you asked, and it’s in the public domain, here it is!

“Livery Stable Blues” by The Original Dixieland Jass Band

The Original Dixieland Jass Band first recorded for Columbia Records on January 30, 1917. The two sides: “Darktown Strutter’s Ball” and “Indiana” were not released at that time. The group recorded for Victor Records on February 26, 1917 and that record: “Livery Stable Blues” b/w “Dixie Jass Band One Step” was released in May. It was a huge hit and helped to launch the Jazz Age.

Members of the ODJB were: Nick LaRocca on Cornet; Edwin Edwards on Trombone; Larry Shields on Clarinet; Henry Ragas on Piano; Tony Sbarbaro on Drums.

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Hey There! Remember Me?

Posted on February 27, 2011 by sixstrstories

From the end of January, through February, up to now, things have been kind of crazy.

Teaching, life, snow = crazy.

So many Historic Days In Music have gone by in the past five weeks without my having commemorated them, that… well, I feel bad, but it’s not ’cause I’ve been slackin’ off.

I do, however, have a list of what I missed.

Birthdays: 1/25/1938 – Blues singer Etta James; 2/8/1899 – Blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson; two incredible singer/songwriter/pianists: 2/9/1942 – Carole King & 2/21/1933 – Nina Simone; 2/25/1943 – George Harrison.

Events: 2/3/1959 – The Day The Music Died (Buddy Holly, Clearlake, Iowa); 2/9/1964 – The Beatles’ American debut on the Ed Sullivan Show (I still don’t understand why they did “Till There Was You” as their second song!?); 2/11/1964 – The Beatles at Washington Colliseum, Washington, D.C.; 2/25/1848: Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susanna” published; 2/26/1917: “Livery Stable Blues” as recorded by the Original Dixieland Jass Band = the first Jazz record.

That’s quite the list. (“Wait’ll next year!”)

I’ll try to do better in the days ahead.

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Sam & Janis

Posted on January 24, 2011 by sixstrstories

“Darling, you – oo-oo-ooo send me. I know you – oo-oo-ooo send me. Darling, you – oo-oo-oo send me. Honest you do, honest you do, honest you do. Whoa – oh – oh-oh-oh-oh.”

Can you hear the voice?

That “sophisticated, crystalline” voice with the “remarkable spiritual resonance”? (Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide to Rock)

The voice belongs to Sam Cooke and the song quoted was “You Send Me,” his first and only #1 hit record, released in 1957. Besides singing it, he also wrote it.

He went on to write and record a string of fabulous songs including: “Chain Gang,” “Cupid,” “Twistin’ The Night Away,” “Having A Party” and “Bring It On Home To Me.”

Sam Cooke was born Samuel Cook on January 22, 1931 in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He was the fourth child of the Reverend Charles and Annie May Cook. He made his first record as a member of The Soul Stirrers in 1951. From 1957, when he started recording as a secular “pop” singer, until his murder on December 11, 1964, Sam’s voice became recognized as “one of the most indelible and influential sounds ever captured on record.” (Joseph F. Laredo, liner notes to Sam Cooke: Greatest Hits on RCA Records)

I couldn’t agree more.

Now try this one.

“Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waitin’ for a train, when I’m feelin’ nearly faded as my jeans. Bobby thumbed a diesel down, just before it rained. He wrote a song on the way into New Orleans.”

Can you hear that voice?

Many adjectives have been used to describe it, none of which would be used in reference to Sam Cooke’s voice. But then Sam was never called “the greatest white female Rock singer of the 1960s.” (Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide to Rock)

That title belongs to Janis Joplin.

The song quoted above was “Me And Bobby McGee,” penned by Kris Krisofferson. Janis’ version was released as a single in 1971 and became a posthumous #1 hit.

Born on January 19, 1943 in Port Arthur, Texas, her father, Seth Joplin, described her as “one of the first revolutionary youth.” It couldn’t have been easy to be a revolutionary youth in Port Arthur, Texas in the late-1950s and early-60s. After several years of singing in Texas bars, she travelled to San Francisco, CA, in 1966 and became lead singer for the band Big Brother and the Holding Company.

She and the band played at the Monterey (California) International Pop Festival in the summer of 1967, a year before they released their first album. Her rendition of  Big Mama Thornton’s “Ball and Chain” is featured in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary film Monterey Pop, and is, in my humble opinion, one of the all-time greatest rock performances on film. Janis is devastatingly mesmerizing. Very Highly Recommended.

Janis Joplin passed away unexpectedly on October 4, 1970 in Los Angeles, CA.

Sam & Janis.

Two of my most favorite singers. Incredible voices silenced far too soon.

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This Historic Day In Music: Elvis Presley

Posted on January 8, 2011 by sixstrstories

Elvis.

Where did your mind go when you read that word?

Mine went to shiny, combed-back, thick black hair. I heard a low, rumbling, twang-tinged voice saying: “Thank you. Thank you very much.” I pictured a young man (with that hair), dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and black necktie, standing at a microphone, eyes closed, expression intense, his right hand in the middle of a downstrum on a leather-encased, dreadnaught acoustic guitar that is being slightly pushed into the mike stand by the forward thrust of his hips.

I heard a voice, singing: “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog…”

Elvis Aron Presley.

The King.

January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977.

On that dash, he changed the world.

Elvis.

Where did your mind go when you read that word?

For a bit more about Elvis, go to the Archives for July 2010 and check out my post of July 5, the anniversary of the day he recorded “That’s All Right (Mama).”

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This Historic Day In Music: Elizabeth Cotten

Posted on January 5, 2011 by sixstrstories

She’d forgotten that she could play the guitar.

She hadn’t played since she was a teenager, back home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; since she’d gotten married to Frank and given birth to Lillie, her one and only. And in all the years since, her life filled with keeping house, raising her daughter, working at job after job cleaning and cooking and taking care of the children in other people’s homes, moving back and forth from Chapel Hill to Washington, D.C. to New York, divorcing Frank and finally settling in D.C. with Lillie and her family, it is no wonder she’d had no time for playing the guitar.

But after a chance encounter in the toy department of a Washington, D.C. store where she was employed, Elizabeth had gone to work one day a week in the music-filled home of Charles and Ruth Seeger. Seeing the Seeger’s teenage children, Mike and Peggy, learning to play guitar and banjo and hearing Mrs. Seeger giving piano lessons, Elizabeth decided to start playing again.

Borrowing Peggy’s guitar, she started trying to resurrect the tunes and songs that she’d written and learned back in Chapel Hill. Gradually, bit by bit, the music and her abilities came back to her and the Seegers took notice. Peggy got Elizabeth to teach her her dazzling style of fingerpicking. Mike, with his fascination for capturing music on tape, started recording Elizabeth’s music.

All of this started in the early 1950’s when Elizabeth, born January 5, 1895, was in her 50’s. So when Folkways Records released her Mike Seeger-recorded debut album, Folksongs and Instrumentals with Guitar, in 1958, her 63 years made her quite a bit older than the average Folk musician just bursting onto the scene. But just like any musician with a new album, she started performing: first at small coffeehouses and schools around Washington, D.C. and then in the early 1960’s at larger concerts and festivals, including  the Newport Folk Festival in 1964.

Her songs, especially “Freight Train” which she wrote at the age of 12, and her unique fingerpicking style (soon dubbed “Cotten picking”) quickly spread and became popular around the world. Her performing and recording career lasted into the 1980’s. She became one of the most influential guitarists of the Folk era and her guitar style is used by performers and recording artists to this day who are looking for a sound that is at once gentle, propulsive, expressive, melodic and capable of providing all the accompaniment a vocal could need.

In 1983, Arhoolie Records released an album of live recordings taken from the late 1970’s to the early 1980’s. Entitled Elizabeth Cotten – Live!, it was awarded the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album in 1984. It is an utterly charming and amazing record of her songs, stories and inimitable guitar playing. Very Highly Recommended.

Elizabeth Cotten passed away in Syracuse, NY, on June 29, 1987.

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Merry Christmas

Posted on December 22, 2010 by sixstrstories

This is my favorite recording/performance of Christmas music. Period. Hands down. No doubt. Head and shoulders above all the rest.

Better than “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” by the Dexter Gordon Quartet. Better than John Fahey’s “Medley: Hark, The Herald Angels Sing/O Come All Ye Faithful.” Better than “Must Be Santa (Polka)” by Brave Combo.

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 Decmber 4, Episode #11 aired. It was “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.”

This is what they played.

“Oh Holy Night” by The City of New Orleans Brass

It takes 4:11 and is worth every second. Headphones recommended.

Merry Christmas and the Happiest of New Years to you and yours.

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Dancing In The Kitchen

Posted on December 20, 2010 by sixstrstories

It was Sunday evening, a bit after seven o’clock. Late for us to be having supper.

We’d had a long, mid-afternoon lunch with some old friends who now live on Cape Cod and were passing through town on their way up to Maine.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, still eating. She was done and standing at the counter, across the room. The radio was on low, in the background. As one song ended and the next one started up, I recognized the new tune instantly: “The Fever” by Bruce Springsteen.

The unmistakable long, slow, rumbling, smokey intro: drums, piano, bass guitar, organ and finally Bruce’s voice: “All right…”  and then the first verse: “When I get home from my job…” Seven minutes and thirty-nine seconds of pure bliss.

That song is 1975: my first job, my downtown-Exeter-Water St. apartment. Her and I, way before… everything else. WBCN-FM in Boston had a tape, an outtake from a Springsteen recording session, an exclusive, and they played it often.

I immediately got up from the table, went to the stereo in the living room and turned up the volume. I came back into the kitchen, tapped her on the shoulder and held out my hand.

Life imitated art.

Back in 1992, in the same kitchen, life inspired art. I made the recording with Andy and Bob in 1995.

“Dancing In The Kitchen” by Eric Sinclair

Hope you enjoy it.

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This Historic Day In Music: Another Double Header

Posted on December 3, 2010 by sixstrstories

Part 1.

On December 3, 1927, Columbia Records held a recording session in Dallas, Texas. They recorded six sides by a 25-year-old gospel singer/slide guitarist/street-corner evangelist named Blind Willie Johnson.

Among the six sides was a piece, not really a song, that featured Johnson: “humming & moaning; accompanied by his own guitar.” It was released in 1928 under the title: “Dark Was The Night – Cold Was The Ground.”

Though I wish I could, I really can’t describe this piece of music. I can tell you that contemporary slide guitar master Ry Cooder called it “the most transcendent piece in all American music” (Guitar Player Magazine, January 1992). I can tell you that it was included along with the music of Beethoven and Chuck Berry on a recording that was sent off among the stars on the Voyager spacecraft.

But you simply have to hear it for yourself.

So, give yourself 3 minutes and 22 seconds to just listen. Click on the link to Youtube below. (If you’ve got headphones, put them on.) Then, you try to describe it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNj2BXW852g

Part 2.

On December 3, 1944, New York City radio station WNEW debuted a weekly, 15-minute, Sunday afternoon radio show featuring singer/guitarist/songwriter Woody Guthrie.  During that first show, Woody explained his musical philosophy:

“I hate a song that makes you think you’re not any good. I hate a song that makes you think you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are either too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that… Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun of you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling.

I am out to fight those kinds of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood.

I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it’s run you down nor rolled over you, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.” 

Someone put those words on a poster. A framed copy of that poster hangs on the wall to the right of the window in the room where I teach.

For some of my students, it is the first time they have heard of Woody Guthrie.

Not a bad introduction.

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This Historic Day In Music: Jimi Hendrix

Posted on November 27, 2010 by sixstrstories

When I was a teenager, I belonged to a record club. Not just any record club, mind you, but the Record Club of America. And though I’m sure that I bought a number of records from them, there’s only one that I actually remember the day I received it in the mail.

That record would be: Electric Ladyland by the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

I can still see that grainy, just-out-of-focus, flaming red and yellow cover photograph/head shot of an emotive, eyes-closed Jimi Hendrix coming out of the brown, corrugated cardboard mailing box. 

I’d been waiting for this one.

It was a two-record set, 16 songs in all, and to a small town New Hampshire teenage boy in 1969, the music contained in those vinyl grooves was…

Side A, my first listen.

Whoa. What the heck was that?

The back of the gatefold jacket said: “…AND THE GODS MADE LOVE.”

Whoa.

The last song on the side was something called “Voodoo Chile.”

The liner notes said that Jack Cassidy (from Jefferson Airplane) played bass and Stevie Winwood (from Traffic) played organ on this song with, I assumed, Mitch Mitchell on drums. 

It was a 15-minute-long cut and there were cheers, clapping, like it was recorded live in a small club or there was a party going on in the recording studio while the band played. Jimi’s guitar is huge, simply huge, his voice passionate and soulful, sounding like he looked on the record cover. 

The music started with a low-string, reverb-drenched guitar riff and slowly built, adding vocals, the organ, bass and drums, through verse, chorus, guitar solo, more chorus, an organ solo and finally climaxed and then slowly dropped down through a drum solo and just when it seemed the song was over, the guitar came back and all of it, not-so-slowly this time, built up again, and let loose with another thunderous, mountain-shattering roar.

End of Side A.

On sides B, C and D, there were more great songs, more mind-boggling sounds, more amazing music unlike any other record I’d ever owned.

“Come On (Part 1),” “Rainy Day, Dream Away,” “Still Raining, Still Dreaming,” “All Along The Watchtower” and (thank you, Jimi!) “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return).”

I am, to this day, in awe as I listen to this music. 

This was the third and soon-to-be final release by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. It came out in October of 1968. Jimi died on September 18, 1970 in London, England, where the Experience had been formed on October 6, 1966.

Jimi Hendrix was born James Hendrix in Seattle, Washington, on this day, Novemeber 27, in the year 1942.

No one before him, no one while he was alive, no one since, ever did or, in my mind, ever will play the electric guitar like he did. No one.

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