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Here is Sister Rosetta Tharpe playing 'Didn't It Rain'. Recorded in Manchester, England in 1964
Did you know that a black woman created rock and roll?
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Midas Whale67
Banned
Superb!
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On 7 May 1964, a gaggle of excited passengers alighted on to a rainy disused railway station platform in south Manchester and took their seats for what one of the city's leading music academics says was a "massively culturally significant" gig. The show at Whalley Range's Wilbraham Road station, recorded for Granada TV as the Blues and Gospel Train, saw greats including Muddy Waters and Sister Rosetta Tharpe perform.
The University of Salford's Dr Chris Lee says the show "influenced nearly everyone who saw it" and was as important as the Sex Pistols' 1976 show at the city's Lesser Free Trade Hall, which spurred attendees Morrissey, Mark E Smith and the musicians who would become Joy Division and Buzzcocks into action. The gig was born out of the Blues and Gospel Tour, which was touring Europe for a second year running, having made its debut in 1963.
The line-up was the stuff of musical legend - alongside Waters and Tharpe were Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Cousin Joe, Otis Spann and the Reverend Gary Davis. But while in 1964, the tour was a hit across the country, Dr Lee says the previous year the only British stop was in Manchester.
'Country catching up'
That, he says, is exactly why the TV programme came to be made in the city. "Manchester was the hottest blues and jazz scene in the country and we already had a very big R'n'B appreciation scene. "The Twisted Wheel [nightclub] had been operating since 1961, playing more or less all urban black music and concerts at the Free Trade Hall were always sold out.
In fact, Manchester was the only place that took the first tour in 1963 - what many people don't know is that a minibus came from London to that show and in it were Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Keith Richards and Brian Jones. They came all that way just to watch the concert. "So by 1964, the country was catching up with Manchester. "Johnnie Hamp, the legendary Granada TV producer, had booked them the year before and did so again, only this time instead of it being in a studio, he had the great idea of staging it in a disused train station in south Manchester."
'Outstanding memory'
Mr Hamp himself says the idea for the station set rolled out of an early show he had done, in which he hired three trains as a backdrop for Little Eva's The Locomotion."Hiring them meant I had a relationship with the railways, so when we decided to do the second blues show outside of a studio, they tipped me off to the derelict station. "I asked if they could throw in a train as well, which we dressed with a cow-catcher and such like, and everything fell into place.
"Of course, the imagery of the trains, the whistle blowing in the distance, is one that is long associated with the blues."
The station was dressed up to look like one from the American South, but typically for Manchester, the weather did not echo that area's dustbowl conditions.
Shortly after the train which carried the audience the few miles south from Manchester's city centre pulled in, a storm lashed the station. Sister Rosetta couldn't believe she was brought to the stage in a horse-drawn carriage - she was used to limousines. Mr Hamp says the downpour would have been his worst memory of the show had it not led to his best. "Sister Rosetta came to me and asked if she could change her opening number to Didn't It Rain?," he said. "When she strapped on her guitar, it was astounding."
Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-27256401
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Mott, what do you think?
Sent from my Lenovo K50-t5 using Tapatalk
Sent from my Lenovo K50-t5 using Tapatalk
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
Well while there is no doubt that R&B, The Blues and Country/Folk music played a profound impact on the development of rock and roll one should keep in mind that rock and roll did not have just one original source and that it was a confluence and combination of these musical traditions into a form of popular music Alan Freed popularized as "Rock and Roll".
Rock and roll was born long before 1964....
Muddy Waters said the blues had a baby & called it rock n roll..............
I have heard lots of old blues (40's-early 50's) which was almost exactly like they were doing in the late 50's........
Listen here: (first done in 1952)
That man on the guitar is none other than Buddy Guy, one of the few alive from that generation.........
Muddy Waters said the blues had a baby & called it rock n roll..............
I have heard lots of old blues (40's-early 50's) which was almost exactly like they were doing in the late 50's........
Listen here: (first done in 1952)
That man on the guitar is none other than Buddy Guy, one of the few alive from that generation.........
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If you read the BBC article, which you clearly didn't, it said that a minibus full of future rock stars came up to Manchester especially for that gig. Let me modify the statement, she was instrumental is initiating and acting as a catalyst for some of the most iconic British rock bands ever. She also inspired many in the US in the 50s like Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis!! Oh and by the way, that guitar is a Stratocaster and Fender didn't start making those till 1954.
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I did read that.... & I am very familiar w/ the British blues scene back then...
Those road shows gave birth to many great blues bands that became rock n roll bands....
Pink Floyd- Named after a couple blues guys,
Rolling Stones-a Muddy waters song
Moody blues, & the classic Manfred Mann double first album.
NOW HEAR THIS:
Those road shows gave birth to many great blues bands that became rock n roll bands....
Pink Floyd- Named after a couple blues guys,
Rolling Stones-a Muddy waters song
Moody blues, & the classic Manfred Mann double first album.
NOW HEAR THIS:
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Another great song.
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That guitar is a Gibson SG Custom with three P90 pickups, which was a bitch to play as the middle pickup would inhibit playability.
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Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
Well to give credit where it's due...the term "Rock and Roll" was popularized by Cleveland disk jokey Allen Freed in the 1950's. So though the music existed before then it was really Freed who popularized the term "Rock and Roll" for this genre of music.
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
You have a bit tunnel vision on the R&B influence on rock and roll which, to be honest, had a more profound impact in the UK and led to the British invasion of the 60's but country artist like Hank Williams, Jimmy Rodgers and Bob Willis, Eddy Arnold had just as much of an impact on the development of rock and roll as the great blues/R&B artist did which you can see in the works of Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Country Joe and the Fish, The Allman Brothers, Commander Cody, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Eagles, Crosby Stills and Nash, etc., who were all heavily influenced by country music.
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Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
Here's Rock and Roll Hall of famer Fats Domino playing some Hank Williams.
He is credited w/ popularizing it & yes, it was in use before he did...
Do you like old rock N roll?? Rockabilly??
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
Absolutely. I remember going nuts when the Stray Cats came out with a rockabilly album in 79. Rock This Town rules. I'm a big Brian Setzer fan.
Sure they contributed to it, & were more popular in America, gee, I wonder why??
Perhaps we can look to pat boone for the answer?? & no, I aint gonna post any pat boone songs, so you can turn your speakers back up.......
The style wasn't being done originally by those folks..........
So lets take it back another step, back in time to the home of BLUES & COUNTRY-The Mississippi delta..
Jimmy Rogers, known as the father of country, Meridian, Miss..
1/3 to almost 1/2 of his songs were blues........... (Country has been knee deep in the blues since it's inception IMHO)
Some samples:
1. Jimmie's Mean Mamma Blues
2. The Southern Cannonball
3. Jimmie The Kid
4. Travellin' Blues
5. The Mystery Of No. 5
6. Memphis Yodel
7. Blue Yodel No. 4 - California Blues
8. Hobo Bill's Last Ride
9. Waiting For A Train
10. Ben Dewberry's Final run
11. My Rough And Rowdy Ways
12. Blue Yodel No.7 - Anniversary Blue Yodel
13. The Brakeman's Blue - Yodelling The Blue Away
14. Let Me Be You Side Track
15. The Hobo's Mediation
16. Train Whistle Blues
Jimmie Rodgers: The Father of Country Music
By Ted Ownby
Mississippi is properly famous as the home of the blues and of the first star of rock and roll. It is also the home of Jimmie Rodgers, described by many as “The Father of Country Music.” Rodgers had two other nicknames during his career, “The Singing Brakeman,” which referred to his work on trains, and “America’s Blue Yodeler,” which described one of his distinctive contributions to country music.
Publicity photographs also portrayed Rodgers as a guitar-playing cowboy and as a sharply dressed man-on-the-town. These various images of a musician who worked on trains, identified with cowboys, sang the blues, yodeled, and knew his way around modern towns and cities help illustrate the range of Rodgers’s musical interests.
The brakeman
Jimmie Rodgers was born James Charles Rodgers outside Meridian, Mississippi, on September 8, 1897. Since his father, Aaron Rodgers, worked on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, Jimmie Rodgers grew up traveling, especially after his mother, Eliza Rodgers, died when Jimmie was only five or six. From age fourteen until he was twenty-eight, he worked, sometimes irregularly, as a brakeman or flagman on railroads that took him through much of the South and Southwest.
Always interested in making music and seeing if he could make a living from it, Rodgers pursued music as a career only after he had to give up railroad work because of health problems. He contracted tuberculosis and discovered that railroad work made it hard for him to breathe. In 1924 Rodgers started singing in traveling shows, vaudeville shows, medicine shows, and various other productions. In 1927 he first performed on the radio in Asheville, North Carolina, and recorded his first songs in Bristol, Virginia. Although he made records for only six years, between 1927 and his death from tuberculosis in 1933, Rodgers recorded more than 100 songs.
The songs
His songs were about three minutes in length, and almost all featured Rodgers playing the guitar. Some songs had bands accompanying the singer, and others consisted entirely of Rodgers playing and singing. Part of Rodgers’s uniqueness lay in the variety of his music and part lay in his appealing voice which almost everyone liked.
Country music, sometimes called hillbilly music, emerged in the early 20th century as a self-consciously traditional, nostalgic music of rural white people in the American South, stretching from Appalachia to Texas. The term “country music” distinguished it from music associated with city people, whether that meant classical music and opera, or Broadway shows and the music of professional songwriters who wrote on so-called Tin Pan Alley in New York.
Many early country musicians knew a wide range of songs, but they adopted a rustic pose to satisfy a broad audience who wanted simple songs about simple life, especially the life on isolated mountaintops, on the free range of Texas, or, perhaps less often, the life on independent small farms. Many early country musicians tended to play, record, and identify themselves with the area from Nashville, Tennessee, to Atlanta, Georgia, to the mountain areas of eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, and to the western parts of the Carolinas and Virginia.
As a Mississippi native and as someone willing to play almost any form of music, Rodgers did not fit the mold of early country music. He did not idealize farm life, and rarely sang about mountains. Rather, through his music he portrayed himself as more of a man of the world. While most of his records were marketed as country or hillbilly music, he learned a great deal from the styles of Tin Pan Alley songs, the blues, and jazz. He performed a few songs with fellow country stars the Carter Family from Virginia, but he also made a recording with Louisiana jazz legend Louis Armstrong. In fact, jazz tubas and clarinets occasionally added surprising twists to Rodgers’s songs. A Hawaiian-themed song included ukuleles, and some Rodgers songs sounded more like fast-moving vaudeville tunes than conventional country songs.
Rodgers’s most notable musical innovation was a series of songs he called Blue Yodels. In his short career he recorded thirteen Blue Yodels. All are in the blues AAB format (saying a line twice and then following with a concluding line). His popular song, “T for Texas,” also called “Blue Yodel No. 1,” began with “T for Texas, T for Tennessee/T for Texas, T for Tennessee/T for Thelma, that woman made a fool out of me.” Blue Yodels were blues songs in style, sound, and lyrics. They generally told of serious trouble, sometimes of violence between men and women, and they rarely had nostalgic or happy endings. The narrator of “T for Texas” planned “to shoot poor Thelma/Just to see her jump and fall.”
Yodeling came from various sources, perhaps from cowboy songs or from the songs of travelers in the Swiss Alps. Rodgers was not the first musician to sing “Yo de lay hee-ho” between verses of his songs, but he made it such a trademark that some people assume country music had always included yodeling.
The lyrics
It is difficult to interpret the lyrics of popular songs as if musicians simply sang about their own experiences and ideas. Popular singers, then as now, tend to combine lyrics about their own experiences with notions of what audiences would like to hear. In some ways they are like autobiographers telling their own stories, while in other ways they are more like actors, playing different roles to entertain their audiences.
Rodgers co-wrote many of his songs, sometimes by reworking older songs, and often by writing a tune while another writer supplied the words. Sometimes he sang popular songs in his own musical style, but sometimes he was clearly singing about himself. For instance, he sang, “I had to quit railroading/It didn’t agree at all.” In another song, he asked, “Will there be any freight trains in heaven?” And when he sang “TB Blues,” and “My Time Ain’t Long,” his audience knew he was singing about his own illness.
Three themes dominated the lyrics of Rodgers’s songs. One was movement. His songs frequently discussed moving by trains or horses. Sometimes movement led back home, but sometimes it did not. A second theme was a sentimental picture of home life. Songs about love and longing for mothers and fathers were common, and Rodgers sang many tunes such as “Daddy and Home” and “Down the Old Road to Home.” A song called “A Drunkard’s Child” began with the child on the road, the mother dead, and the father drunk, all because “Daddy went to drinking.” Through the third theme, he performed numerous songs about failed love. Sometimes love failed because men or women left, or because they cheated, or even because they committed crimes and went to jail. People in Rodgers’s songs often spent time on chain gangs, or in the jailhouse, and they spent their time there lamenting the bad decisions that kept them away from the people they loved.
Throughout his travels and his illness, Rodgers kept up an image of a smiling, likable individual. He built up a large body of fans both through his likable stage performances and his numerous records. Along with the serious topics of many of his songs—illness, separation, violence, poverty, troubles of many kinds—he could be playful. In one of his early popular songs, “Peach Picking Time Down in Georgia,” he began with the image of everyone working hard, picking crops in different parts of the South, but ended by “pickin’” an attractive woman, with whom he hoped to pick a wedding ring. The multiple uses of “pickin’” was even more amusing because the term also referred to a guitarist “pickin” his instrument. Partly because of his ability to make play out of trouble, Rodgers became, in the words of historian Bill Malone, “the first country singing star.”
Two features of Mississippi life were especially important for Rodgers, who sang songs such as “Mississippi Moon” and “Mississippi Delta Blues.” First, working on trains gave him numerous stories about, and insights into, traveling people. In his songs, he empathized with people on the move, in large part because whether as a railroad worker or a traveling musician, he was one of them. This empathy was especially important in the 1930s during the Great Depression, when so many people had to travel in search of work. Songs like “Hobo’s Meditation” portrayed sad men riding the trains from the point of view of a sympathetic narrator who hopes their eventual destination of heaven would have no insulting people or “tough cops.” Second, as a Mississippian, Rodgers grew up hearing more African-American music than most early country musicians were likely to have heard. The Blue Yodels were unique among country songs in part because they followed the style of the blues.
Like many blues musicians who moved to Chicago, and like Elvis Presley who moved to Tennessee, Rodgers spent his later years away from Mississippi. As a singer, Rodgers usually identified himself as a Texan. He spent his last few years in Texas because he believed the climate of southern Texas was especially healthy and because he enjoyed the image of a cowboy.
Rodgers knew his death was coming, and sang about it. Tuberculosis was a common killer in the early 20th century, and he was declining physically as he took a train to New York for what proved to be his final recording session for RCA Victor in 1933. At age 35, he was so weak that he had to rest on a cot between songs. He died at the Taft Hotel in New York on May 26, 1933, the night after the session, planning to make more records.
Jimmie Rodgers was extraordinarily popular in his short lifetime, and remains popular with generations of music fans. Numerous musicians have remade Rodgers’s songs, especially “T for Texas” and “In the Jailhouse Now,” and his influence has been wide. He was the first performer inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1961 and in 1976, the Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Museum opened in his home town of Meridian.
Ted Ownby, Ph.D., is professor of history and southern studies at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty and Culture, 1830-1998 and of Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920.
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
As for the old rock. Hell yea. Some of the best ever get down and boogie songs are old rock songs.
I mean Jerry Lee Lewis crushed it in the 50's. I mean you have to put it in the context of his times but compared to even Elvis he was way out there and his live shows were like nothing no one had seen at the time.
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
Then there was Chuck Berry who showed the world what you could do with a guitar. I mean his Johnny B. Goode was 20 years ahead of it's time.