Jimmie Rodgers

It recently came to my attention that I've posted a scant few hillbilly or country records here on the flu. So, considering that a good portion of my collection of shellac are just that, I'll start today to pick up the hillbilly deficit with none other than Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music. Labels don't really do justice to his contribution to music. Let's just call this music of the American vernacular, as you would about the photographs of Walker Evans, or the writing of Mark Twain. Rodgers, who only recorded for less than six years, has more in common with Blind Willie McTell, Louis Armstrong and Woody Guthrie, than the slick redneck neo-hipster posers of Music Row today. Doug Sahm said it best a few years back, when he took a poke at the current state of "country": "Who said Bob Wills' fiddles was a joke? All's you know it had been been replaced by laser beams and smoke..." None of that here. From the laudanum haze of the TB ward, I give you Jimmie Rodgers, The Singing Brakeman...















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*** SPECIAL BONUS mp3 GONE ***

Jimmie Rodgers on YouTube! Here, Here, and Here.
Buy Jimmie Rodgers music at Amazon
Buy Doug Sahm music, Here.
Read more Here.

Blue Monday

Fats Domino is sick and tired of being sick and tired. It's blue Monday here at the Flu. Sorry if I've been a little lax around here with the posting, but what started as a mission is starting to feel like a burden. Don't get me wrong, I love sharing this stuff, and Google Analytics tells me people from Siberia to South Africa are digging the flu. Not to sound like a Jewish mother or something, my dear readers, but would it hurt you to use the comments? Send me a love letter. Tell me you hate my guts. Anything, I dare you...














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Bonus:
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Buy at Amazon: Fats Domino, Alex Chilton

Barbara Lynn

Like many good things in American music, I first heard this from degenerate English record collectors. Barbara Lynn Ozen, from Beaumont, Texas played guitar left-handed with style and grace, wrote and sang a handful of classic R & B numbers before disappearing from the music scene to raise a family. Influenced by Guitar Slim, Gatemouth Brown, and Elvis, she fronted an all-girl band called Bobbie Lynn and the Idols, before being discovered and recorded by Huey Meaux. In the late 90's Barbara returned to recording and performing. She's playing at the Ponderosa Stomp in New Orleans in May. This record is a killer.





















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Barbara Lynn on YouTube here , here and here (with Gatemouth Brown)

Buy at Amazon: Barbara Lynn, The Rolling Stones

Love And Theft

This is NOT breaking news. There's been a lot of hub bub about this over the last several years. The title of this record was taken from a book about black-face mintrelsy and the white American working class of the 19th century. There was the revelation that Dylan lifted lyrical passages from a Japanese novel about a gangster's dying confession. Then, the Dylan sleuths uncovered a variety of references to everything from F. Scott Fitzgerald to the musical appropriations illustrated below. I prefer appropriation, the post-modern term for borrowing, although some will claim it is outright theft. Maybe it is. Or maybe it's homage, which Dylan has paid to everyone from Woody Guthrie to Elvis over the course of his career. He's an artist after all, and to deny that he is partially the sum of everything that he has consumed, is to miss the point. When the Beach Boys released "Surfin' USA," they over-zealously gave Chuck Berry a co-writing credit. It does bear a thematic resemblance to "Sweet Little Sixteen," but so does half of the catalog of numerous rock 'n roll bands. Chuck Berry learned it for T-Bone Walker and Louis Jordan, and they learned it from those before them, and so on.














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Harold Arlen

Great songs are timeless and great songwriters know this. Harold Arlen was one such songwriter. Below are a few selections of his songs spanning 70 years. Arlen was born Hyman Arluck, the son of a cantor from Buffalo, New York. He started his career playing piano in the red hot jazz band The Buffalodians, and moved on to the Cotton Club, Broadway and later Hollywood. If you don't know his name, you know his songs: "One For My Baby (And One For The Road)," "Blues in the Night," "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive," "It's Only A Paper Moon," "That Old Black Magic," as well as the music from The Wizard of Oz and the selections below. Arlen was a fine soulful singer and a great interpreter of his own songs made famous by others. Check out his vocal performance on "Stormy Weather." The vocals come in at about a minute and a half into the number. Also, we get a reprise of Charlie Parker, playing with Red Norvo's All-Stars; Keith Richards and Bobby Keys on his most famous composition; and Memphis' Reigning Sound, from my favorite record of 2002.

For further reading on Arlen, check out this article from the New Yorker by John Lahr.














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Listen: GONE mp3 - Keith Richards and Bobby Keys

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Blue Bird

Sixty years ago today, Charlie Parker entered C.P. MacGregor Studios in Hollywood for his first session in over seven months. Two fine ballads were recorded: "Dark Shadows" and "This Is Always" with singer Earl Coleman, who was there at Parker's insistence and Ross Russell's dismay. His previous session, on July 29th, 1946 yielded two of the most harrowing and tortured ballads ever recorded, "Lover Man" and "The Gypsy". There was a panic on Central Avenue and Bird, strung out and dope-sick suffered a breakdown, that landed him at Camarillo State Hospital the following day. As painful as they are are, these two records, which Bird pleaded with Ross Russell not to release, are extraordinary. On "Lover Man", Bird misses his intro and the piano plays on while he finds his place only to unleash the most anguished solo of pure and heartbreaking beauty. Without taking time to playback the take, Russell had the band led by trumpeter Howard McGhee start the next selection, "The Gypsy". Here they are, coupled with the 1947 Earl Coleman session in all their pain and glory, one take each, for eternity.














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Photo: © William P. Gottlieb 1946















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*** For the sake of fidelity, all selections here are taken from the out of print 1989 Stash Records' The Legendary Dial Masters, Volume One. These are, in my opinion, the best sounding versions of these available on compact disc, and mastered from somebody elses 78's in much better condition than mine.

Around The World With Hank Snow

Alright folks, back to the shellac. Let's get one thing straight. Hank Snow loves women, and he doesn't discriminate. In the sampling below, he's got a Spanish fireball: who "made a perfect date and in her Cadillac-8 love began to expand"; an Arabian Baby; and in my personal favorite, Hank falls for a multi-instrumentalist of stringed instruments fom Memphis, Tennessee. I think I see what he means.














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