It’ s a yuletide blues, country, rock, and pop extravaganza. Deeper Roots celebrates the holidays with a selection of holiday hits from the past century. And we don’t necessarily stop there. You’ll also be entertained by some very special blues and R&B numbers selected from the past, featuring selected tracks from an incredible assortment of holiday tracks featured on the Document Records releases “Blues Blues Christmas”, Volumes 1 through 4.
Join Dave Stroud for music from Louis Armstrong, Butterbeans & Susie, Darlene Love, John Prine, and many, many more.
We’ve got a special Monday episode of Deeper Roots. The show originally broadcast live from the KOWS studios in Occidental, California, opens with some Light Crust Doughboys, fires up some modern country gospel from the Watson Twins and Johnny Cash, then goes for the jugular with a collection of Baptist-flavored gospel from Moses Mason, Mother McCollum, and Madam Edna…and that just scratches the sacred surface. The show also features the secular: jump blues from Jesse Price, jazz from Lincoln Center and Willie “The Lion” Smith. Had enough? You won’t. Be sure to check it out.
Our KOWS weekend show airs live every 2nd and 4th Saturday of the month, direct from the KOWS studios in Occidental. In this episode we feature the usual blend of roots music including the country sounds of Joe Maphis, The South Georgia Highballers, Lead Belly, The Levon Helm Band, and we’re going to be entertained by Emmy Oro and her 1950 piece “A Fish House Function (For a Cross Eyed Cat Named Sam)”. And, as usual, it’s so much about the personalities, the stories that the songs tell, as well as the stories behind the music itself. Join Dave Stroud for all of this and more.
In contrast with the folk, blues, and urban sounds being played in the juke joints, ballrooms, and bars in the early century, there was another, much lighter fare being broadcast over the radio airwaves and being celebrated on the silver screen. It was something that was somewhat more benign in its message and certainly more palatable to the masses. It would be called ‘popular music’. But it is as arguably significant as any of the genres we think of as Americana or roots…because it too often shared a common thread of influence.
Deeper Roots marches through the pre-War sounds of Tommy Dorsey and His Clambake Seven, Cliff Edwards, The Boswell Sisters, The Ink Spots, and Eddie Cantor…to name only a few. As the country was still hung over from the Great Depression, the entertainment industry concocted a formula for music and message, painting an overly bright picture of a golden sunrise, reminding folks that “we’ve got a lot of what it takes to get along” even as the dark clouds of tyranny were beginning to spread over Europe. The music represented a sort of blissful ignorance.
Deeper Roots takes the theme route in our next KWTF episode, featuring jazz, gospel, country, blues, rock, and R&B that all share the road with stories of that twentieth century cultural icon (and muse): the automobile. We’ll hear songs of Mercurys, Cadillacs, Fords, and Chevrolets that run the gamut of old and new and tell stories of love in the backseat, first car nostalgia, tragedy on the road, and racing in the streets. Performers in this show includeDavid Lindley, K. C. Douglas, Mink DeVille, Kevin Russell and others who will follow a theme that is one of the more common to come out of our age of assembly lines and the rust belt.
It’s part two of our “Chicago Breakdown” series. In Part I, we explored the early days that promised what was to come but in Part II, we feel the warm wind of change from the south that would meet with the cold winds off of the Great Lakes. It created a vortex where jazz and barrelhouse would reign.
The urban cauldron in this city of big shoulders would fill with a sound that had its roots in the Mississippi Delta , from the cotton plantations and delta heat, and the juke joints that could be found down the side roads off of Highway 61. The Great Migration also provided those who relocated and found work with disposable income allowing them to establish a new life in a big city after the Great Depression and, most certainly, after the war. The resulting energy was inescapable in the clubs and barrooms throughout Chicago.
Langston Hughes is a favorite writer of mine, right along Lincoln Steffens, Peter Guralnick, Mark Twain, Bill Bryson…but I digress.
In 1942, the Chicago Defender published a review of a Memphis Minnie performance written by Hughes. It’s made its way around the horn many times and is, in my mind, priceless as it gives us the opportunity to witness a performance by Memphis Minnie without every seeing one. It’s a perfectly viable alternative to a YouTube video.
Memphis Minnie sits on top of the icebox at the 230 Club in Chicago and beats out blues on an electric guitar. A little dung-colored drummer who chews gum in tempo accompanies her, as the year’s end — 1942 — flickers to nothing, and goes out like a melted candle.
Midnight. The electric guitar is very loud, science having magnified all its softness away. Memphis Minnie sings through a microphone and her voice — hard and strong anyhow for a little woman’s — is made harder and stronger by scientific sound. The singing, the electric guitar, and the drums are so hard and so loud, amplified as they are by General Electric on top of the icebox, that sometimes the voice, the words, and melody get lost under sheer noise, leaving only the rhythm to come through clear. The rhythm fills the 230 Club with a deep and dusky heartbeat that overides all modern amplification. The rhythm is as old as Minnie’s most remote ancestor.
Memphis Minnie’s feet in her high-heeled shoes keep time to the music of her electric guitar. Her thin legs move like musical pistons. She is a slender, light-brown woman who looks like an old-maid school teacher, with a sly sense of humor. She wears glasses that fail to hide her bright bird-like eyes. She dresses neatly and sits straight in her chair perched on top of the refrigerator where the beer is kept. Before she plays she cocks her head on one side like a bird, glances from her place on the box to the crowded bar below, frowns quizzically, and looks more than ever like a colored lady teacher in a neat Southern school about to say, “Children, the lesson is on page 14 today, paragraph 2.” ….
But Memphis Minnie says nothing of the sort. Instead she grabs the microphone and yells, “Hey, now!” Then she hits a few deep chords at random, leans forward ever so slightly over her guitar, bows her head and begins to beat out a good old steady down-home rhythm on the strings — a rhythm so contagious that often it, makes the crowd holler out loud.
Then Minnie smiles. Her gold teeth flash for a split second. Her ear-rings tremble. Her left hand with dark red nails moves up and down the strings of the guitar’s neck. Her right hand with the dice ring on it picks out the tune, throbs out the rhythm, beats out the blues.
Then, through the smoke and racket of the noisy Chicago bar float Louisiana bayous, muddy old swamps, Mississippi dust and sun, cotton fields, lonesome roads, train whistles in the night, mosquitoes at dawn, and the Rural Free Delivery, that never brings the right letter. All these things cry through the strings on Memphis Minnie’s electric guitar, amplified to machine proportions — a musical version of electric welders plus a rolling mill.
Big rough old Delta Cities float in the smoke, too. Also border cities, Northern cities, Relief, W.P.A., Muscle Shoals, the jooks, “Has Anybody Seen My Pigmeat On The Line,” “See-See Rider,” St. Louis, Antoine Street, Willow Run, folks on the move who leave and don’t care. The hand with the dice-ring picks out music like this. Music with so much in it folks remember that sometimes it makes them holler out loud….
It was last year, 1941, that the war broke out, wasn’t it? Before that there wasn’t no defense work much. And the President hadn’t told the factory bosses that they had to hire colored. Before that it was W.P.A. and the Relief. It was 1939 and 1935 and 1932 and 1928 and the years that you don’t remember when your clothes got shabby and the insurance relapsed. Now, it’s 1942 — and different. Folks have jobs. Money’s circulating again. Relatives are in the Army with big insurances if they die.
Memphis Minnie, at year’s end, picks up those nuances and tunes them into the strings of her guitar, weaves them into runs and trills and deep steady chords that come through the amplifiers like the Negro heartbeats mixed with iron and steel. The way Memphis Minnie swings it sometimes makes folks snap their fingers, women get up and move their bodies, men holler, “Yes!” When they do, Minnie smiles.
But the men who run the place — they are not Negroes — never smile. They never snap their fingers, clap their hands, or move in time to the music. They just stand at the licker counter and ring up sales on the cash register. At this year’s end the sales are better than they used to be. But Memphis Minnie’s music is harder than the coins that roll across the counter. Does that mean that she understands? Or is it just science that makes the guitar strings so hard and so loud?
— “Music at Year’s End”
Langston Hughes
From The Chicago Defender
January 9, 1943
Reprinted in
“Oxford American Magazine”
Spring, 2003
Here’s your morning coffee and tea! Join Dave Stroud for a helping of ukulele, blues, gospel, and outlaw meta-modern country sounds. If you haven’t had a chance to find us on a West County Saturday morning, your chance is every second and fourth Saturday morning at 9 PST on TuneIn radio http://tunein.com/radio/KOWS-LP-1073-…. This eclectic blend of music from the past century is also played out on Sundays at 10 PM This week’s show will feature a Langston Hughes reading, some Maria Muldaur, some early century pop from The Boswell Sisters, some cold hard country facts from Sturgill Simpson and Porter Wagoner, and blues from Dave Alvin and Big Bill Broonzy.
It’s the first of a two part series here on Deeper Roots, exploring the history of Chicago Blues, beginning with its jazz influences. The city of Chicago played a major role in the evolution of jazz as an American musical art form. And there are many reasons for it. Its locale, its ‘big shoulders’ of industry that attracted young workers from throughout the nation in the first half of the century, and its atmosphere of clubs and cabarets that stimulated the market for accomplished entertainment.
Our first episode covers the early jazz of King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Johnny Dodds but also covers the blues of Memphis Minnie, Peetie Wheatstraw, Big Maceo, and Tampa Red…classic Chicago sounds of performers who ‘built the city’ as one that invite post-War inheritors of the Great Migration.
We open our Deeper Roots show with some gospel from George and Tammy, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Frank Jenkins and then move onto some R&B, bluegrass and country. The first hour celebrates the sound of roots music from the West Sonoma County studio of KOWS, 107.3 FM while in the second hour, we talk to Josh Windmiller of the North Bay Hootenanny about a show coming up this Sunday at Petaluma’s Mystic Theater featuring David Luning, The Sam Chase, and John Craigie. Josh performs and provides some back stories to the upcoming show.
