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Reeotch
Trad climber
4 Corners Area
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Jan 11, 2013 - 10:14am PT
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George Carlin: "White people got no business playing the blues"
Except for this guy, and he's real white!!!!
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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S.Leeper
Social climber
somewhere that doesnt have anything over 90'
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Jan 11, 2013 - 09:20pm PT
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Local Boy
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Gary
Social climber
Desolation Basin, Calif.
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 11, 2013 - 12:40am PT
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Captain Beefheart is the blues:
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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tornado
climber
lawrence kansas
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LIke jazz, something that old/middle age white people are into these days.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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The blues is something only poor people from a certain bygone time in the American south really understand and know.
People from other regions and other times know it only through recorded media or concerts. Even that generation is now passing into the history books.
Will the Blues survive as a cherished musical form into the foreseeable future?
Yes. Because it has a depth and power that steadily calls across the years, with a clear,wailing voice --- long after the times and the people that created the Blues have become a vanishing memory.
Long live the BLUES!
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Amen!
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FRUMY
Trad climber
Bishop,CA
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Nov 19, 2013 - 04:46pm PT
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The blues is when the shop you are trying to get built, that should have been finished in August still ain't done. The Lathes, Mills, & Welding gear you need are still in L.A. taking up space in a building you need to sell & somewhere in that building are my Lightning Hopkins tapes. & all would be bearable if I could find those tapes & the rest of my blues & jazz tapes, but they are stuffed in there somewhere behind tons of metal.
THE BLUES ARE UNIVERSAL & something anyone can understand.
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survival
Big Wall climber
Terrapin Station
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Nov 19, 2013 - 08:45pm PT
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Gary, with the Beefheart!!!
Marlow, with the Leon and the Mule!!
The blues is where my wife will be tomorrow night in Alexandria, VA with my man Robert. I used to see Robert in the bars in Spokane, when we were both young!!!
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 21, 2013 - 03:15am PT
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[Click to View YouTube Video]
http://harrysmusic.wordpress.com/2008/11/05/high-john-de-conquer/
High John de Conquer
By Bob7261
I was surprised to hear mention made in Robert Mugge’s Deep Blues of the charm called John de Conquer because I’d only run across references to that talisman twice before.
John de Conquer, or sometimes High John de Conquer, is a dried root believers say has magic properties. It can bring luck in love or gambling. In Deep Blues the owner of the Memphis music store Mugge visits expounds on it and another charm before he even begins talking about recordings.
Since I started researching this subject I’ve found the charm cited in blues lyrics by Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Bo Diddley and Dr. John.
High John de Conquer is also mentioned in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
My own introduction to the legend came in an October 1943 essay in American Mercury magazine by Zora Neale Hurston. In that essay, called High John de Conquer, Ms Hurston described what she said was a legend brought from Africa by transplanted slaves. The legend described a will-of-the-wisp who could not be shackled by the power of the slave owners.
“First off he was a whisper, a will to hope,” Ms Hurston wrote. “Then the whisper put on flesh . . . The sign of the man was a laugh . . . sure to be heard where the work was hardest and the lot most cruel . . . Maybe he was in Texas when the lash fell on a slave in Alabama, but before the blood was dry on the back he was there . . . Somebody in the saddest quarters would feel like laughing and say, ‘Now High John de Conquer, Old Massa couldn’t get the best of him . . .’”
Old Massa couldn’t get the best of him because he didn’t know High John existed. The legendary figure was the slaves’ secret.
In Invisible Man High John de Conquer plays the same role. His existence isn’t mentioned until the narrator turns his back on the cruelty and platitudes of the white world and begins to explore the invisible life of blacks in the Harlem ghetto. The riches of that life aren’t known to the whites because, like High John de Conquer, the secret hasn’t been shared.
The clue High John de Conquer offers about a hidden life intrigues me because it speaks, as much of the music we are listening to speaks, of a hidden community with its own delights and its own quirks and its own peculiarities.
The community in Invisible Man is a black one, but I suspect there are similar communities to which belong anyone powerless, anyone disenfranchised, anyone under the lash that Ms Hurston speaks of.
Significantly, the hero of those communities is not a hero of strength but a hero of wiliness. He’s like Brer Rabbit, and there’s no shame for him in telling lies or being shiftless or devious or crafty. Those are tools he needs for his psychic survival.
Most adults don’t like to think of themselves as employing those tools and it would be hard for us to imagine ourselves into a world in which they were prized, except that we weren’t always adults. We once were children, and as children we had our own secret life of powerlessness with its own songs and chants and taunts and superstitions.
And I’m only going on my own experience here but I have to suspect we didn’t shy from being dishonest, crafty, shifty and devious either.
I’d have to strain to make a connection between the world of blues and the world of children, but when we are looking at the blues in particular and this music in general it might do us well to remember the powerless and sly six-year-olds we used to be.
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splitter
Trad climber
SoCal Hodad, surfing the galactic plane
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Nov 21, 2013 - 10:15am PT
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i think some peoples are just done born with the blues. ain't no way around it...
[Click to View YouTube Video]
BJ Sharp ~ Never Felt No Blues
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survival
Big Wall climber
Terrapin Station
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Nov 21, 2013 - 01:18pm PT
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Always loved this one.
Kinda hard to pin the blues on it, but for my money...
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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