All posts by Hallgeir

Blues, Film, Lightnin' Hopkins

Documentary: The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins

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LH1

“He was like an ancient oracle in his uncanny ability to improvise rhyming blues songs about a person or situation that revealed a truth that was perfect in its simplicity, yet infinitely complex in its layers of meaning.”
– Les Blanks on Lightnin’ Hopkins 

This little film is a poem, a celebration of art and musicianship. It feels otherworldly, almost magic in it’s realism. For me it is one of the very few films that manage to capture the essence of music. You will know a lot more about “the blues” after seeing it, but it may take some time to sink in. One day you’ll sit in your car on your way home from work and it will dawn on you, and you’ll want to watch it again. I did, and I’ve seen it many times. The great Texas bluesman Lightnin’ Sam Hopkins is captured brilliantly in this deeply moving “story”.

This little film is a music poem.

I came to Hopkins through Townes Van Zandt. I read several interviews where he talked about his great admiration for Lightnin’ Hopkins. This has been my way to the blues, through country and folk. Through Hank Williams and Townes Van Zandt.

Les Blank reveals Lightnin’s inspiration, and features a lot of classic blues. Scenes include an outdoor barbecue, a rodeo and a visit to Hopkins’s boyhood town of Centerville, Texas. I believe this powerful portrait is among Blank’s special masterworks.

Made by Les Blank and Skip Gerson, probably in 1968 (…or 1969 or 1970, there are sources on all these years).

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The Blues accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins:

You make your bed hard, baby,
and calls it ease.
The blues is just a funny feelin’,
yet some folks calls it a mighty bad disease.

“This line was composed late one night while I was filming what started out to be an ordinary interview. I had asked him to tell me what the blues meant to him. He picked up his guitar and started to sing about a woman named Mary who had left him. Earlier that evening his wife had left him after a nasty argument that caused her cousin to attempt to shoot Lightnin’.

While the song was being sung, the cousin was lurking outside the apartment door with a loaded pistol. Lightnin’ also had a large loaded gun stuck down the front of his pants. Hardly a situation in which to delve into an academic and linear exploration of the nature of truth and the blues, but I came away feeling I knew a lot more about it than before, but I couldn’t exactly put it in words.”

– Les Blanks (notes on the film)

– Hallgeir

Country, Film, Waylon Jennings

Documentary: My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys a musical documentary with Waylon Jennings

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WJ2

“I think everybody secretly dreams of being a cowboy, no matter where they`re from.”
– Waylon Jennings

It is “roundup” time in Texas. In a ritual that has changed little since the times of “the wild west”, cowboys ride out twice a year to gather up the cattle and prepare them for the market.

Waylon Jennings spent 10 days roaming the 250 square miles of the 06 Kokernot Ranch with these cowboys to tell the story of his experience in this musical documentary, “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.”

Waylon Arnold Jennings (June 15, 1937 – February 13, 2002) was an American singer, songwriter, musician, and actor. Jennings began playing guitar at 8 and began performing at 12 on KVOW radio. He formed a band, The Texas Longhorns. Jennings worked as a D.J. on KVOW, KDAV, KYTI, and KLLL. In 1958, Buddy Holly arranged Jennings’s first recording session, of “Jole Blon” and “When Sin Stops (Love Begins).” Holly hired him to play bass. During the “Winter Dance Party Tour,” in Clear Lake, Iowa, Holly chartered a plane to arrive at the next venue. Jennings gave up his seat in the plane to J. P. Richardson, who was suffering from a cold. The flight that carried Holly, Richardson, and Ritchie Valens crashed, on the day later known as The Day the Music Died. Following the accident, Jennings worked as a D.J. in Coolidge, Arizona, and Phoenix. He formed a rockabilly club band, The Waylors. He recorded for independent label Trend Records, A&M Records before succeeding with RCA Victor after achieving creative control of his records.

During the 1970s, Jennings joined the Outlaw movement. He released critically acclaimed albums Lonesome, On’ry and Mean and Honky Tonk Heroes, followed by hit albums Dreaming My Dreams and Are You Ready for the Country. In 1976 he released the album Wanted! The Outlaws with Willie Nelson, Tompall Glaser, and Jessi Colter, the first platinum country music album.
– Wikipedia

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It is fascinating and educational with a fantastic soundtrack.

My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys – a musical documentary with Waylon Jennings:

– Hallgeir

Music Calendar

July 27 in music history

Bobbie Gentry is 70 Happy Birthday (read more)

Roberta Lee Streeter (born July 27, 1944), professionally known as Bobbie Gentry, is an American former singer-songwriter notable as one of the first female country artists to compose and produce her own material. Her songs typically drew on her Mississippi roots to compose vignettes of the Southern United States.

 bobbie gentry

July 27: Bob Dylan: North Country Blues, Newport, Rhode Island 1963 (read more)

On July 26, 1965, Johnny Cash performed at Newport with this great band:

 

  • Johnny Cash (v, acg)
  • Luther Perkins (eg)
  • Marshall Grant (b)
  • WS Holland (d)

 

 Bob Dylan Newport 1963

Leon Russell Wilkeson (2 April 1952 – 27 July 2001)

Bassist of Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd from 1972 until his death in 2001

With its outlaw/party-hearty image, tough southern rock, and solid touring, Skynyrd quickly became one of the top bands of the 1970s, scoring such hit albums as 1974’s Second Helping, 1975’s Nuthin’ Fancy, 1976’s Gimme Back My Bullets and One More from the Road, plus 1977’s Street Survivors—and such hit singles as “Free Bird” and “Sweet Home Alabama.” It was also during this classic era that Wilkeson picked up the gimmick of wearing colorful hats onstage, garnering the nickname “Mad Hatter.”

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Conway Savage (born 27 July 1960) is an Australian rock musician best known as pianist/organist/backing vocalist for Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds.Savage joined the group in 1990 for their The Good Son tour of that year, and has since appeared on albums such as Henry’s Dream, Let Love In, Murder Ballads, The Boatman’s Call, No More Shall We Part and Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus. One of his more noticeable performances is on the song “The Willow Garden”, a b-side of “Where the Wild Roses Grow”, where in a rare occasion for the Bad Seeds, Conway does lead vocals. conway_savage_pola
New York Dolls is the debut studio album by the New York Dolls, released on July 27, 1973, by Mercury Records. The band formed in 1971 and developed a following while playing regularly in lower Manhattan. However, they were unappealing to record companies because of their onstage cross-dressing and vulgarity, while most record producers were reluctant to work with them. For shock value, the band was photographed in exaggerated drag on the album cover. NewYorkDollsNewYorkDolls

Spotify Playlist – July 27
Music Calendar

July 26 in music history

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Mick Jagger is 71 Happy Birthday! (read more)

Mick Jagger’s career has spanned over fifty years. His performance style has been said to have “opened up definitions of gendered masculinity and so laid the foundations for self-invention and sexual plasticity which are now a part of contemporary youth culture”.

 

Read more about Mick Jagger and Rolling Stones

 mick jagger

July 26: Johnny Cash: Newport Folk Festival, Freebody Park, Newport 1964 (videos & audio) (read more)

On July 26, 1965, Johnny Cash performed at Newport with this great band:

 

  • Johnny Cash (v, acg)
  • Luther Perkins (eg)
  • Marshall Grant (b)
  • WS Holland (d)

 

 Johnny Cash, NFF64, #2

July 26: Bob Dylan: Visions of Madonna, Tramps New York City, New York 1999 (read more)

On the 26th of July, 1999, in a club in Manhattan, Bob Dylan delivered one of his greatest performances ever of his well-loved 1966 epic “Visions of Johanna.” As if to acknowledge and signal his awareness of the power and freshness of this latest reinterpretation, the singer-bandleader effectively changed the title of the song halfway through, by starting to sing the chorus as: “And these visions of Madonna are now all that remain/ … have kept me up past the dawn.”
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan: Performing Artist Volume 3: Mind Out Of Time 1986 And Beyond)

 bobdylan1999

“Harper Valley PTA” is a country song written by Tom T. Hall that was a major international hit single for country singer Jeannie C. Riley in 1968. Riley’s record sold over six million copies as a single. The song made Riley the first woman to top both Billboard’s Hot 100 and the U.S. country single’s charts with the same song, a feat that would go unrepeated until Dolly Parton‘s “9 to 5 ” in 1981. According to several sources – it was recorded in July 26 – 1968.

 Harper Valley PTA
Darlene Love (July 26, 1941)
American popular music singer and actress. She gained prominence in the 1960s for the song “He’s a Rebel,” a No. 1 American single in 1962, and was one of the Phil Spector artists who produced a celebrated Christmas album in 1963		 DarleneLove_HerMySpace
Mary Esther Wells (May 13, 1943 – July 26, 1992) was an American singer who helped to define the emerging sound of Motown in the early 1960s. Along with the Supremes, the Miracles, the Temptations, and the Four Tops, Wells was said to have been part of the charge in black music onto radio stations and record shelves of mainstream America, “bridging the color lines in music at the time.”With a string of hit singles composed mainly by Smokey Robinson, including “Two Lovers” (1962), the Grammy-nominated “You Beat Me to the Punch” (1962) and her signature hit, “My Guy” (1964), she became recognized as “The Queen of Motown” until her departure from the company in 1964, at the height of her popularity. She was one of Motown’s first singing superstars. 200px-Mary_Wells_1964

Spotify Playlist – July 25
Music Calendar, Sound

July 25 in music history

July 25: Bob Dylan: Avignon, France 1981 (Video)

As Dylan concludes his moderately successful European tour, tragedy strikes with two deaths in the crowd. “Saved” is seconds old when the stage is shrouded in darkness as a member of the crowd falls onto the electrical cables. In the confusion a girl falls from a wall. Dylan and the band are forced to improvise some acoustic rhythms on stage until power is finally restored, after which Dylan performs a 25-song set to an enthusiastic crowd. The set includes five songs from Shot of Love: “In the Summertime,” “Shot of Love,” “Lenny Bruce,” “Watered Down Love,” and “Heart of Mine.”
~Clinton Heylin (Bob Dylan: A Life in Stolen Moments Day by Day 1941-1995)

 bob dylan avignon 1981

July 25: Bob Dylan: Newport, Rhode Island 1965 (Electric controversy)

On July 25, 1965, Dylan performed with a rock band at the Newport Folk Festival. Some sections of the audience booed Dylan’s performance. Leading members of the folk movement, including Irwin Silber and Ewan MacColl criticised Dylan for moving away from political songwriting, and performing with an electric band. 

 dylan-guitar-1965

Steve Goodman (July 25, 1948 – September 20, 1984)

American folk music singer-songwriter from Chicago,Illinois. The writer of “City of New Orleans”, made popular by Arlo Guthrie and Willie Nelson, Goodman won two Grammy Awards.

 steve goodman

Back in Black is an album by Australian hard rock band AC/DC. It is the seventh Australian and sixth internationally released studio album by the band.Released on 25 July 1980, Back in Black was the first AC/DC album recorded without former lead singer Bon Scott, who died on 19 February 1980 at the age of 33, and was dedicated to him. The band considered disbanding following Scott’s death, but they ultimately decided to continue, with encouragement from Scott’s parents, and shortly thereafter hired Brian Johnson as their new lead singer and lyricist. Producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange, who had previously worked with AC/DC on Highway to Hell, was again brought in to produce. The album was recorded at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas, and Electric Lady Studios in New York, where the album was also mixed.

 Back+In+Black

Paul’s Boutique is the second studio album by American hip hop group Beastie Boys, released on July 25, 1989, on Capitol Records. Featuring production by the Dust Brothers, the recording sessions for the album took place in Matt Dike’s apartment and the Record Plant in Los Angeles from 1988 to 1989, after which the recordings underwent mixing at the Record Plant in Los Angeles. Subsequent remixes were done at the Manhattan-based Record Plant Studios.

 beastie boys paul

Spotify Playlist – July 24