Oh god, this one's going to ramble! I've been writing an O&M manual for a facility in the NWT, roaming back and forth through drawings, specifications, old emails and shop drawings. I've been scouring the web for equipment documentation, and just plain scratching my head. The music in the background keeps me sane.
Yeah, I have our entire music collection (well almost, still working on old LPs and cassettes) on disk as mp3s. It was huge to begin with, and then I started a musical odyssey last year that has consumed an awful lot of time, not to mention disk space. I guess that's what this is all about.
I've always loved my music, but I get stuck in ruts. I was listening to CBC in the car last year and they played "My Ukulele Helps Me Beat the Blues" by the Highwater Jug Band. Never heard of them, but I chased them down when I got home. Googled them and discovered Myspace Music (Highwater Jug Band). Immediately ordered the CD (hey they're a local Calgary band - gotta support them). But... now I have to investigate both Myspace Music and Jug Band Music.
MySpace Music has links to "Friends", often similar music, sometimes so different that it opens new directions to go chasing down. Most pages have streaming music samples. Some remain static, others rotate music samples. And yes, they're full songs, not just 30 second clips. Some are so good that all you can do is email the artists and demand that they release a CD as soon as possible, if not sooner. Yeah, many of them are just local bar bands or groups just starting out. My god, the talent out there!
To reduce the frustration level, I acquired a copy of Replay Music, a great program that will record anything running through your sound card and save it as an mp3. It even tries to identify it and tag it correctly. It hasn't tagged so well on non-released music, obviously! However, I now have a selection of "MySpace" music tucked into my music collection. Some of my favourites are Sausage Grinder, Gallus Brothers, Howling Brothers, Hunger Mountain Boys, Two Man Gentleman Band, Pea Ridge Ramblers and Matt Kinman, (a little strange, but I really do like him). The list goes on and on. Some, like The Two Man Gentleman Band and The Hunger Mountain Boys, have commercial CDs out, others, like the Gallus brothers, will sell you CDs that they produce on their own computer.
In short, DO waste some time following links on MySpace, I promise you'll be pleasantly surprised if you persist.
Another music source, that unfortunately is no longer available to me, is Pandora. Because a few record companies won't grant them unlimited licences, this site is now restricted to computers physically located in the good old US of A. I've bought a lot of music based on finds at this site before they shut Canadians out, but they don't get my business any more because they won't let me discover it! Fools!
Pandora is an amazing site that developed out of a project that categorizes music according to hundreds of "qualities". When you join (free) you start your own radio station(s) by selecting artists or songs you like. It will then start streaming similar music, based on the "qualities" of your examples. Choose "like" or "dislike" for any song it plays and it fine-tunes your preferences. It introduced me to many artists I'd never heard of, who are now among my favorites. Damn, I miss it.
I said this was going to ramble...
I discovered Old Crow Medicine Show on Pandora. That introduced me to Old Time Music again, something I've been peripherally interested in, but never really collected. "Wait a minute - didn't Doc do that?" Get out all of the old Doc Watson and start listening to it again. Hey that's pretty bluesy. But then, he plays lots of Mississippi John Hurt.
Pandora turned me on to a little known group called Cumberland Gap out of St. Louis. Mostly country, but I really liked a ballad called Louis Collins. Checking it out, I found it was another old Mississippi John Hurt song. (This link from the Internet Archives, check it out too). Now I haven't listened to him for years - always thought he was a little too bluesy for me. How our tastes change! I LOVE his stuff now. I started listening to him again and found out how many songs I've liked other people singing that were taken from his repertoire.
Jorma Kaukonen was another Pandora discovery. "Blue Country Heart" - yes, kinda country , but quite bluesy. I'm starting to think I've really been a blues fan all along and just didn't realize it..
Back to the web. I start chasing back in history. Who wrote it and when? Most of this stuff is OLD. "I'm Free from the Chain Gang Now", off Blue Country Heart - yeah, an old Johnny Cash song, and most websites credit him with it. But it goes way back before that. Lou Hersher & Saul Klein wrote it a long time ago and Jimmy Rodgers recorded it in the early thirties.
I go back and look at other songs by these same artists and find common origins for many songs in the mid 20's to mid 30's. This was a prolific time for music. Jazz, Blues and Country seem to have developed out of what was happening on the streets at the time. We don't usually think of blues being "white man's music". Check out White Country Blues. By the way, this is another site I like. Amazon doesn't have everything I look for, but there is a lot of music you can sample.
Out in the street, improvised instruments were used out of necessity - there simply wasn't the money to buy instruments, but the urge to create music was unstoppable. Music was usually played with guitars, fiddles, tubas etc. The harmonica was the poor man's fiddle, the jug was the poor man's tuba. Washboards and washtub basses added to the mix, and the kazoo was thrown in for fun.
And in a rambling roundabout way, this brings me back to what started this entry. This was the height of the popularity of Jug Bands. While I was discovering music origins in this way, I was also backtracking from the Highwater Jug Band.
I had discovered the Jug Band Revival of the 60's. For the most part, it wasn't that well known, although Jim Kweskin had a large following. Many well known artists (Dave Van Ronk, Country Joe MacDonald, John Sebastian, Maria Muldaur etc.) had their roots in jug band music. Elektra "put together" the Even Dozen Jug Band as their answer to Jim Kweskin. They didn't last long - only 1 LP - with Muldaur joining Kweskin (for you Maria Muldaur fans, check this out! Don't laugh too hard!) and Sebastian going on to form the Loving Spoonful.
Although they were primarily a pop group, we all (at least those of old enough) remember the Loving Spoonful's "Jug Band Music", not jug music - too much electric guitar - but a marvelous tribute. Look a little deeper and you find Fishin' Blues and My Gal are from the early part of the century. The lyrics for Younger Girl were written by John Sebastian, but the melody is pure Gus Cannon (from Prison Wall Blues - I discovered it here sung by the Gallus Brothers).
Although Sebastian concentrated on pop music, his jug band roots stayed with him. He has now formed a group called the J-Band, and has sometimes been joined by Fritz Richmond and Geoff Muldar of the Kweskin Band, as well as Yank Rachel, an original jug band leader. They and others participated in a documentary called Chasin' Gus' Ghost, written and directed by independent filmmaker Todd Kwait, that grew out of his desire to learn more about jug music. See the trailer here.
The J-Band's CD Chasin' Gus' Ghost CD has become one of my current favourite listens.
In the meantime, my collection has grown considerably (and I've probably bored friends and family silly with this obsession). I've barely scratched the surface of my research here. Jug band music is far more deeply engrained in our music than we have any idea of. The most facinating link that I found was with Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. They were a small local jug band in Palo Alto, CA in the 60's. They were told that to make it, they'd have to go electric. They resurfaced the next year as the Warlocks, but as another group was already using that name, they had to find another. Jerry Garcia picked Grateful Dead out of a dictionary (defined as "the soul of a dead person, or his angel, showing gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged their burial.") and the rest is history.
Jug band music pervades the Grateful Dead repertoire, and both Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir continued their association with it outside the band as well. I'm not a Grateful Dead fan, the electrics just turn me off, but I've become a dedicated Jerry Garcia follower. His early career, pre-Mother McCree was heavily into bluegrass, one of my favourite styles of music. He continued to produce music outside of his Grateful Dead association throughout his life. Some of his earliest works, including coffee house duets with his first wife Sara Ruppenthal, recordings with the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers, the Wildwood Boys and the Black Mountain Boys are available as bootleg recordings on the internet. He has done extensive work with David Grisman (once of the Even Dozen Jug Band) including the Old & In The Way CDs with fiddle great Vassar Clements.
I guess I really should wind this up. This is probably as organized as my ramble through the music has been over the last year or so, but if you've enjoyed it, fine. If not, so what - I didn't twist your arm to read this far!
The entry below is a nod to my daughter Bronwyn's newest musical discovery - the 40's. In helping her out, I've started to discover and rediscover more gems. I'll probably bore you silly with them if you come back!
Yeah, I have our entire music collection (well almost, still working on old LPs and cassettes) on disk as mp3s. It was huge to begin with, and then I started a musical odyssey last year that has consumed an awful lot of time, not to mention disk space. I guess that's what this is all about.
I've always loved my music, but I get stuck in ruts. I was listening to CBC in the car last year and they played "My Ukulele Helps Me Beat the Blues" by the Highwater Jug Band. Never heard of them, but I chased them down when I got home. Googled them and discovered Myspace Music (Highwater Jug Band). Immediately ordered the CD (hey they're a local Calgary band - gotta support them). But... now I have to investigate both Myspace Music and Jug Band Music.
MySpace Music has links to "Friends", often similar music, sometimes so different that it opens new directions to go chasing down. Most pages have streaming music samples. Some remain static, others rotate music samples. And yes, they're full songs, not just 30 second clips. Some are so good that all you can do is email the artists and demand that they release a CD as soon as possible, if not sooner. Yeah, many of them are just local bar bands or groups just starting out. My god, the talent out there!
To reduce the frustration level, I acquired a copy of Replay Music, a great program that will record anything running through your sound card and save it as an mp3. It even tries to identify it and tag it correctly. It hasn't tagged so well on non-released music, obviously! However, I now have a selection of "MySpace" music tucked into my music collection. Some of my favourites are Sausage Grinder, Gallus Brothers, Howling Brothers, Hunger Mountain Boys, Two Man Gentleman Band, Pea Ridge Ramblers and Matt Kinman, (a little strange, but I really do like him). The list goes on and on. Some, like The Two Man Gentleman Band and The Hunger Mountain Boys, have commercial CDs out, others, like the Gallus brothers, will sell you CDs that they produce on their own computer.
In short, DO waste some time following links on MySpace, I promise you'll be pleasantly surprised if you persist.
Another music source, that unfortunately is no longer available to me, is Pandora. Because a few record companies won't grant them unlimited licences, this site is now restricted to computers physically located in the good old US of A. I've bought a lot of music based on finds at this site before they shut Canadians out, but they don't get my business any more because they won't let me discover it! Fools!
Pandora is an amazing site that developed out of a project that categorizes music according to hundreds of "qualities". When you join (free) you start your own radio station(s) by selecting artists or songs you like. It will then start streaming similar music, based on the "qualities" of your examples. Choose "like" or "dislike" for any song it plays and it fine-tunes your preferences. It introduced me to many artists I'd never heard of, who are now among my favorites. Damn, I miss it.
I said this was going to ramble...
I discovered Old Crow Medicine Show on Pandora. That introduced me to Old Time Music again, something I've been peripherally interested in, but never really collected. "Wait a minute - didn't Doc do that?" Get out all of the old Doc Watson and start listening to it again. Hey that's pretty bluesy. But then, he plays lots of Mississippi John Hurt.
Pandora turned me on to a little known group called Cumberland Gap out of St. Louis. Mostly country, but I really liked a ballad called Louis Collins. Checking it out, I found it was another old Mississippi John Hurt song. (This link from the Internet Archives, check it out too). Now I haven't listened to him for years - always thought he was a little too bluesy for me. How our tastes change! I LOVE his stuff now. I started listening to him again and found out how many songs I've liked other people singing that were taken from his repertoire.
Jorma Kaukonen was another Pandora discovery. "Blue Country Heart" - yes, kinda country , but quite bluesy. I'm starting to think I've really been a blues fan all along and just didn't realize it..
Back to the web. I start chasing back in history. Who wrote it and when? Most of this stuff is OLD. "I'm Free from the Chain Gang Now", off Blue Country Heart - yeah, an old Johnny Cash song, and most websites credit him with it. But it goes way back before that. Lou Hersher & Saul Klein wrote it a long time ago and Jimmy Rodgers recorded it in the early thirties.
I go back and look at other songs by these same artists and find common origins for many songs in the mid 20's to mid 30's. This was a prolific time for music. Jazz, Blues and Country seem to have developed out of what was happening on the streets at the time. We don't usually think of blues being "white man's music". Check out White Country Blues. By the way, this is another site I like. Amazon doesn't have everything I look for, but there is a lot of music you can sample.
Out in the street, improvised instruments were used out of necessity - there simply wasn't the money to buy instruments, but the urge to create music was unstoppable. Music was usually played with guitars, fiddles, tubas etc. The harmonica was the poor man's fiddle, the jug was the poor man's tuba. Washboards and washtub basses added to the mix, and the kazoo was thrown in for fun.
And in a rambling roundabout way, this brings me back to what started this entry. This was the height of the popularity of Jug Bands. While I was discovering music origins in this way, I was also backtracking from the Highwater Jug Band.
I had discovered the Jug Band Revival of the 60's. For the most part, it wasn't that well known, although Jim Kweskin had a large following. Many well known artists (Dave Van Ronk, Country Joe MacDonald, John Sebastian, Maria Muldaur etc.) had their roots in jug band music. Elektra "put together" the Even Dozen Jug Band as their answer to Jim Kweskin. They didn't last long - only 1 LP - with Muldaur joining Kweskin (for you Maria Muldaur fans, check this out! Don't laugh too hard!) and Sebastian going on to form the Loving Spoonful.
Although they were primarily a pop group, we all (at least those of old enough) remember the Loving Spoonful's "Jug Band Music", not jug music - too much electric guitar - but a marvelous tribute. Look a little deeper and you find Fishin' Blues and My Gal are from the early part of the century. The lyrics for Younger Girl were written by John Sebastian, but the melody is pure Gus Cannon (from Prison Wall Blues - I discovered it here sung by the Gallus Brothers).
Although Sebastian concentrated on pop music, his jug band roots stayed with him. He has now formed a group called the J-Band, and has sometimes been joined by Fritz Richmond and Geoff Muldar of the Kweskin Band, as well as Yank Rachel, an original jug band leader. They and others participated in a documentary called Chasin' Gus' Ghost, written and directed by independent filmmaker Todd Kwait, that grew out of his desire to learn more about jug music. See the trailer here.
The J-Band's CD Chasin' Gus' Ghost CD has become one of my current favourite listens.
In the meantime, my collection has grown considerably (and I've probably bored friends and family silly with this obsession). I've barely scratched the surface of my research here. Jug band music is far more deeply engrained in our music than we have any idea of. The most facinating link that I found was with Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. They were a small local jug band in Palo Alto, CA in the 60's. They were told that to make it, they'd have to go electric. They resurfaced the next year as the Warlocks, but as another group was already using that name, they had to find another. Jerry Garcia picked Grateful Dead out of a dictionary (defined as "the soul of a dead person, or his angel, showing gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged their burial.") and the rest is history.
Jug band music pervades the Grateful Dead repertoire, and both Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir continued their association with it outside the band as well. I'm not a Grateful Dead fan, the electrics just turn me off, but I've become a dedicated Jerry Garcia follower. His early career, pre-Mother McCree was heavily into bluegrass, one of my favourite styles of music. He continued to produce music outside of his Grateful Dead association throughout his life. Some of his earliest works, including coffee house duets with his first wife Sara Ruppenthal, recordings with the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers, the Wildwood Boys and the Black Mountain Boys are available as bootleg recordings on the internet. He has done extensive work with David Grisman (once of the Even Dozen Jug Band) including the Old & In The Way CDs with fiddle great Vassar Clements.
I guess I really should wind this up. This is probably as organized as my ramble through the music has been over the last year or so, but if you've enjoyed it, fine. If not, so what - I didn't twist your arm to read this far!
The entry below is a nod to my daughter Bronwyn's newest musical discovery - the 40's. In helping her out, I've started to discover and rediscover more gems. I'll probably bore you silly with them if you come back!
You've really got the blogger bug havn't you?!
ReplyDeleteGlad to see you have some where to let out all your pent up musical discoveries!!
Do you know how to record streaming music?
ReplyDelete