I’m thankful for every moment.
~Al Green
The music is the message, the message is the music. So that’s my little ministry that the Big Man upstairs gave to me – a little ministry called love and happiness.
~Al Green
“Green plays the boyish Sam Cooke supplicant–or maybe a smooth Otis Redding, or an assertive Smokey Robinson–with the startling is-that-a-synthesizer? high note…”
~Robert Christgau (in 1970 – review of “Gets next to you” album)
Let’s Stay Together (Live 1972):
I don’t look at music from the standpoint of being a musician; I look at it from the standpoint of being a human being.
~Herbie HancockIt’s not exclusive, but inclusive, which is the whole spirit of jazz.
~Herbie HancockHerbie Hancock is a true icon of modern music. Throughout his explorations, he has transcended limitations and genres while still maintaining his unique, unmistakable voice.
~allaboutjazz.com
Continue reading “April 12: Herbie Hancock was born in 1940”
Recorded when Presley was 25, fresh off a two-year military stint and musically fit to burst, Elvis Is Back! might be the King’s greatest noncompilation LP: wildly varied material, revelatory singing, impeccable stereo sound.
~Will Hermes (rollingstone.com)
Continue reading “April 8: Elvis Presley released Elvis is Back! in 1960”
…I didn’t grow up wanting to be a country singer, and I still don’t really see myself as one,… I mean, I don’t feel like I have much in common with those folks. Their job is to sell out arenas. Mine is to make art. Big difference.
-Jason Isbell (Men’s Journal interview)I don’t believe in writer’s block. I think that’s laziness.
-Jason Isbell (musicradar.com, 2016)
This is the first of five posts on Jason Isbell’s 25 best songs (in BTL’s humble opinion). We do (how can one not?) include his work together with the brilliant Drive-by Truckers.
Here are the first 5 songs (25-21 on our list).
From the album “Something More Than Free” (2015).
Palmetto rose in the AC vent
Cross-stitched pillow where the head rest went
He said his cab was his orneriest friend
Left him jumping like trees in the wind
..a swampy, swinging rocker that takes an anthemic turn during every chorus. A tribute to Charleston, South Carolina — where, coincidentally, 400 Unit guitarist Sadler Vaden lived before relocating to Nashville in 2011 — the song has since become a staple of Isbell’s shows, even serving as the opening number during a recent show at the House of Blues in Boston. Slightly slower in tempo, “Palmetto Rose” takes on new life during the Boston performance, with Isbell and his five-piece band moving between the loose blues-rock of the song’s verses to a taut refrain.
– rollingstone.com
–
This war that I wage to get up every day
It’s a fiberglass boat, it’s azaleas in May
It’s the women I love and the law that I hate
Lord, let me die in the Iodine State
Lord, let me die in the Iodine State
“Man, you don’t know how I felt that afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice.”
– Muddy Waters
“I rambled all the time. I was just like that, like a rollin’ stone.”
– Muddy Waters
Wikipedia (Read more):
McKinley Morganfield (April 4, 1913 – April 30, 1983), known as Muddy Waters is generally considered the “father of modern Chicago blues”. He was a major inspiration for the British blues explosion in the 1960s, and was ranked #17 in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.
In his later years Muddy usually said that he was born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, in 1915, he was actually born at Jug’s Corner in neighboring Issaquena County, Mississippi, in 1913.
One of the greatest and most influential blues artists of all times.
Got my Mojo workin, 1976:
His grandmother Della Grant raised him after his mother died shortly after his birth. His fondness for playing in mud earned him the nickname “Muddy” at an early age. He then changed it to “Muddy Water” and finally “Muddy Waters”.
Illustration by Michael Cho
The actual shack where Muddy Waters lived in his youth on Stovall Plantation is now at the Delta Blues Museum at 1 Blues Alley in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He started out on harmonica but by age seventeen he was playing the guitar at parties emulating two blues artists who were extremely popular in the south, Son House and Robert Johnson.
You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had:
“His thick heavy voice, the dark coloration of his tone and his firm, almost solid, personality were all clearly derived from House,” wrote music critic Peter Guralnick in Feel Like Going Home, “but the embellishments which he added, the imaginative slide technique and more agile rhythms, were closer to Johnson.”
Album of the day, The Folk Singer by Muddy Waters:
Muddy Waters started out playing acoustic blues in the Delta, and it shows on this return to his roots, it is probably designed to appeal to the mid-1960s surge of interest in blues music, especially in the UK. It is a great acoustic blues album. You’ve got Muddy Waters and you’ve got legendary songwriter/bassist Willie Dixon, and a young Buddy Guy on lead guitar! Waters sings very strong and the sound is surprisingly clean , enjoy!
Other April 4th:
Gary Moore was born in 1952 in Belfast Ireland.
In a career dating back to the 1960s, Moore played with artists including Phil Lynott and Brian Downey during his teens, leading him to memberships with the Irish bands Skid Row and Thin Lizzy on three separate occasions. Moore shared the stage with such blues and rock luminaries as B.B. King, Albert King, Colosseum II, George Harrison and Greg Lake, as well as having a successful solo career.
Moore died in his sleep of a heart attack in his hotel room while on holiday in Estepona, Spain, in February 2011
Elvis Presley:
A taped Elvis Presley concert entitled Elvis: Aloha From Hawaii was telecast on NBC in the USA and proved to be a huge success. The total worldwide audience for the show, the first commercial worldwide satellite broadcast, amounts to over a billion people.
-Hallgeir
Sources: Wikipedia, Allmusic, Peter Guralnick – Feel Like Going Home and Robert Gordon’s wonderful book:
Televised as a Rockpalast Special; The correct date for the Van Morrison show is Sunday April 4. The Rockpalast Night where this show was taken from started on April 3 around 11:00 pm with Rick James. Van played the second set and this was around 1:00 am on April 4. Therefore date of the actual show started on April 3 (in the late evening) and ended on April 4 (in the early morning). The broadcast date was the following evening April 4. Most of the Rockpalast shows are broadcast the date following the actual show. Hence the show was played over the 3rd and 4th of April 1982. It was broadcast live across Europe on April 4, 1982 that evening. This is why this show sometimes circulates as April 3 , 1982 (panicstream.net)
Lenght: 1h18m10s
Musicians:
Continue reading “April 4: Van Morrison in Grugahalle, Essen 1982”