So I already explained the bourbon portion of this backstory here. My last post listed 7 songs I punched up to accompany a glass or three of great whiskey but my wife was out of town and my night lasted a lot longer than 7 songs.
People had some good suggestions, so I thought I’d go back to the well and keep going.
I left off with Patrick Sweaney and his modern day ballad Hotel Women.
So I finish that track and I like it. I like it A LOT. But that song is from 2007! Kids that were born in 2007 are still only in the 4th grade. My bourbon is older than this song! Sure, its great and all, but now I’m in the mood for something older. And classic. Like GOLD STANDARD classic.
Easy pick. Old favorite. Goes with almost any occasion, especially with a drink in my hand.
At Last by Miss Etta James
Every one thinks this is her song. Its not. In fact, it was first recorded when Miss James was 3 years old.
It was written by two New York immigrants, one from Poland the other Italian, for a 1942 movie called Orchestra Wives starring George Montgomery and Ann Rutherford. In fact, even before that, an orchestral non-lyric version was in the Milton Berle film Sun Valley Seranade performed by co-star Glenn Miller (yes, THAT Glenn Miller)
However Etta James got her hands on it in 1960 for her debut album with Riley Hampton improvising a melody off from the original and history was made. In 1999, The Recording Academy inducted Etta James’ unforgettable version into the GRAMMY Hall of Fame that honors recordings of lasting qualitative or historical significance.
Christina Aguilera was a personal friend of Etta James and had a special affinity for this song. She often closed her concerts with a version of it. When James passed away in 2012, Aguilera was asked by the family to perform the song at her funeral. While not a fan of Christina’s current music or general genre, she is an AMAZING singer and I can not wait until she is older and uses that voice to sing unbelievable versions of great songs like this.
So now I’m feeling the retro-vibe in full force. Who wouldn’t after that song? I have both much older and much newer traditional blues songs I want to get to, but Etta James is unspeakably good and I don’t want to let this go quite yet.
But what can follow up on At Last by Etta James? What could possibly--Oh, I know…
Again, everyone thinks Georgia On My Mind is a Ray Charles song. And again, its not. Recorded in 1930 by Hoagy Carmichael and His Orchestra as a fox trot (!!!). It was covered by plenty of people and even popped up on the charts in 1931 by Frankie Trumbauer and again a year later by Mildred Bailey. Ronnie Hawkins and The Hawks played this in most of their live sets through the late 50’s.
But in 1960, Ray Charles released The Genius Hits the Road and this song was on it. It hit the #1 spot on the US Billboard Hot 100 and the rest is history.
On March 7, 1979 as a gesture of reconciliation after years of civil rights conflicts in Georgia, Charles was invited to perform this live before the combined houses of the Georgia Six weeks later is was formally adopted as the State Song of Georgia, and still holds that distinction to this day.
My god what a song...the sweeping string arrangement, the gospel-style back up vocals and Ray.
Yeah...and Ray.
So that song fades and I clink my ice around a bit and realize that I have to get back to some hard core blues or this mix is going to go off on a whole new direction. Not a bad direction, per se, but I still have a lot of whiskey to drink.
So forgetting about any attempt at transition or segue, I just went straight to Jimmy Reed.
Known more for his big electric sound Reed is also one of the best harmonica players, ever. But I skipped right over his huge rock-influencing hits like “Bright Lights, Big City” and the other six songs the Rolling Stones stole covered. Elvis covered him as did Van Morrison, The Steve Miller Band, and Neil Young. The Yardbirds wrote tributes to him. The guy is a megastar, but struggled with undiagnosed epilepsy, rampant alcoholism and violent relationships with women all his life to the point that he could never really take his career to the next level.
A sad story no doubt, but for tonight’s bourbon-based set list we’ll go with the short slightly lesser known song Little Rain with its obligatory Jimmy Reed harmonica solo about halfway through.
So now I have harmonica chords swirling across my bourbon-bathed brain. Reed is great but he is not The Greatest. There is only one man that has ever been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame specifically as a harmonica player. A bluesman so revolutionary in his approach to the instrument that he gets compared to people like Jimi Hendrix and Django Reinhardt for conjuring up a whole new sound and then bestowing it to all the generations of musicians that follow him.
Marion Walter Jacobs was the name he was born with in Marksville, Louisiana but he will forever be known and revered as Little Walter. He learned how to play his harp as a child in the rural south but when he got to Chicago he discovered the magic of amplification. Little Walter is the first recorded artist, of any genre or instrument, to deliberately use electronic distortion as a way to generate new sounds and timbres as actual music.
He became a staple of Muddy Waters’ band and played harmonica (acoustically) on almost every recording Muddy did after 1950. He actually left the band to tour and play on his own, but Chess records would hire him and schedule Muddy’s recording sessions around his availability to make sure his harmonica was on every record. (The only exception is Waters’ original version of his classic Mannish Boy)
Anyway, for tonight we need something with a good blues swag feeling to it. Something short and sweet. So a few taps into Spotify and I have something with no lyrics at all and just a touch over 3 minutes long: Sad Hours.
Sad Hours reached the #2 spot in Billboard’s R&B chart. There is only one instrumental harmonica song that has ever reached #1 and it spent 8 weeks there. It was the first take of the first song of the first recording session for a new solo artist. Literally a man walking into the studio for the first time, pulling out a harmonica, and showing everyone what he could do. The year was 1952, the song was called “Juke” and the man was Little Walter.
At this point, I have my feet propped up, the dog is asleep next to me and I’m half tempted to send these songs through my big speakers. But its late and the volume I’d want it at would not help me make friends with my neighbors. Besides, I have these awesome Sennheiser Momentum Wireless noise canceling headphones and these songs sound fantastic while simultaneously blocking out everything from the outside world that isn’t warm, brown and 95-proof.
A police car goes by below me with its lights flashing. I’m sure the siren is blaring but all I hear is Little Walter. Uninterrupted. As it should be.
So with back to back harmonica masters, I think we’re well and settled back on track for good blues and good blues are something that anyone in the world can appreciate. Take for example, Anders Osborne, a young man from a small town on the west coast of Sweden called Uddevalla. He played the guitar a bit and listened to Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and then… Then he discovered Robert Johnson and the door to American Blues Music opened before him and swallowed him whole.
He’d tour around Europe and ultimately come to his true spiritual home of New Orleans. As a musician, he’s been named the best guitar player of New Orleans multiple years in a row. As a songwriter his tunes have been snapped up by numerous big name artists, including Tim McGraw who took his “Watch the Wind Blow” to the No. 1 spot on the Country Music Charts.
So lets listen to him team up with a the North Mississippi Allstars (a Grammy nominated trio of two brothers and a friend from Henando, MS) to belt out a slow blues number about a woman that comes suddenly into a mans life and comes in so fast and so hard that it just wrecks his entire home.
Homewrecking women are a standard Blues premise to be sure, but you don’t have to be the sharpest tool in the shed to get the real meaning behind this when the man is singing from New Orleans and this mysterious woman is named Katrina.
O Katrina, what have you done? Everything I love is almost gone.
Since you came along, babe I just can’t go home.
The Swedish Kid Turned New Orleans Blues Star story is good one, but I think I can do better.
Second Self was a mediocre-at-best struggling rock band in Detroit and some of its former members were rehearsing in some warehouse space one Saturday with the windows open and overheard a street performer playing blues at Detroit’s famous Eastern Market.
What they heard was Robert Bradley; an older black blind man singing and playing music he learned as a child in The Alabama School for the Blind in Talladega. Mr. Bradley had moved to Detroit and performed off and on on the streets for money. And this Saturday he was ON.
So these three young white guys (a guitarist, a bassist and a drummer) are sitting by this open window for an hour listening to this guy just kill it on the street before they get smart enough to go down and invite him up.
The result was the formation of Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise that put out their first album in 1994. It wavers a bit between blues and rock, but there is enough blues on it for our purpose and I’ve had one song in particular saved on my phone since about 1997: Governor
That voice has a kind of Otis Redding rasp to it. The bass and drums are perfect. And the lyrics channel true Delta emotion right into the cold heart of Detroit Michigan.
I like how the song starts falling apart structurally as it progresses. It rolls right a long to about 1:20 when Bradley gives a little moan and there is an actual short break in the music, then it picks right back up and the rhythm is back on point but the vocals are now hanging a bit on the “I wish the governor..” refrain while the other lyrics are coming a little looser through to 2:32… another break and then Bradley starts really riffing while still keeping the “I wish the governor” line on point. We coast through an organ solo and when he comes back at 3:45 he’s just pouring out the blues.
He comes right back on beat with a strong “I wish the governor….” and then I love the “Ya’ll those folks down there in Washingotn DC: I wish you’d just leave me alone. You know I need to go to work and get some money for the Baa-ayyy-bee.”
I love this song. I have always loved this song.
So at this point, I need a refill and I’m feeling much more comfortable with the amount of money I paid to buy this bourbon and have it shipped out to me in Berkeley.
I head in to get more ice but first I grab my phone to just grab some low hanging fruit. I’m drinking and listening to blues and here I am 13 songs in and I haven’t heard from Mr. B.B. King!
There are well over a 100 songs I could choose here, though quite a few of them would be a bit to guitar-rocking to fit in tonight. But I have one in mind. Worried Dream was released in 1967 (before he hit it big with “The Thrill Is Gone” ) and popularly covered by Fleetwood Mac in 1971. Little Milton did a version, as did Larry Davis.
But tonight we’re going back to the source:
Nothing more bluesy than a man singing about being sick with worry and having nightmares that his woman is cheating on him.
I did seven songs on the first post, and here are the next seven so I guess I’ll stop here again and end it the way I ended the first set.
What I’d like to hear is songs I DONT know.
If you know of some good tracks that would match these please post them! PLEASE. If you cant find them on YouTube, just give me the name, artist and how to find the specific version (Album? Live Performance date?) and I’ll seek it out.
Cheers.