3 posts tagged “blues”

I made mention of R. L. Burnside a couple of posts ago.  I have since learned a couple of his tunes and found some YouTube vids of him playing.  Consider this a long over due Musical Wednesday thingy.  I'm also including a video of Junior Kimbrough and Jessie Mae Hemphill, two more North Mississippi Blues superpowers.

These two videos are from 1984.

A more succinct title might be: "Things I'm doing alongside playing Video Games," because this should in no way insinuate that I have stopped.  At any rate, life can't completely stop just because I have a blinky new totem that I tend to bow and scrap in front of most of the day.  So, in no particular hierarchy, here's a couple other things that I've been doing.

• Learning to play in Open Tunings - From this book. If you play guitar that might actually mean something to you.  If not, just know that there are myriad ways to tune the strings on a guitar and each way requires a slightly different nuance to be able to use it.   It's not something I ever really messed with but always wanted to.  So now I am.
• Mourning the Death of Robert Jordan - My wife has already posted the news and I'm sure most people who follow the books have already heard about James Oliver Rigney Jr.'s passing.  I knew his prognosis wasn't good and I knew his one year mortality rate was ridiculously high but I still held onto a fool's hope that he'd hang on long enough to finish the final book.  Granted, there were a few lemons in the series but overall it remains one of my favorite book series and my #2 favorite setting (behind Middle-earth).  Even so, I really genuinely enjoyed the last book.  As I understand it, he dictated Memory of Light to his wife who will finish the book for him posthumously.
  
• Not Sleeping So Great - This is the second morning this weekend that I've been unable to fall asleep before 10am the following day.  My inability to sleep like a normal human is well-documented.  My mother tells stories of my exploits (at the tender age of two) staying awake in my crib until 3am four or five nights a week.  She said she'd just sit up with me while I played the night away.  She said she got basically no sleep until I got old enough that they didn't have to worry about me eating poison or trying to swallow a plastic bag if I was awake and alone.   We have Lunesta samples but I don't like swilling them every day like a junkie (I don't take pills more often than I have to).  The only upside is that with my job, I don't have to be up and at work by 9am like normal people.  So if I need to crash out for a few hours during the afternoon following a sleepless night I can.
  
• Teaching, Quite a Bit - Also good news, I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 to 40 students in my studio right now.  That makes for decent walking around money.  There are few things I'd rather be doing.
  
• Worrying About Which Step We're On - Apparently someone decided to write a book about all the scary stuff I've been silently thinking in my head for a few years now.  I never really said anything because I didn't want to sound like a paranoid nut-job.  I guess you're not really paranoid if everyone really is out to get you.  
  
• Contemplating Starting a Band - Since I ditched my last gig, I've been relaxing and enjoying my liberated six hours a week that used to be tied up in a fruitless pursuit of something so intangible, it changed every week.  Don't ask.  Anyway, since then I've decided I either want all of the control on a creative project or none of it.  i.e. Either tell me what the hell you want me to play and cut me a check; or play it like daddy says.  Anyway, if I start a band, it'll probably be a blues band.  They're easy to put together, low pressure and have a good shelf life.  We'll see if I actually get off my tuckus and do it.
  
• Walking Dogs - Gratuitous cute doggy pics to follow: 
  

  Look its Dobby, NO! it's The Murph
• Washing Dogs - See previous entry:
  

  I'm in ur lapz, stealin' ur snoozez
• Listening to R. L. Burnside - This one was so important I decided to save it for last.  I recently discovered a new bluesman I really really like.  The Blues has been a genre of music that I keep returning to no matter how far or long I stray from it.  I got into it around the same time I got into Hendrix and the Counterculture music of the 60s. Since then I've been peeling back the layers of virtually every kind of popular music looking for blues roots.  I could probably write a dissertation on the subject (but someone probably already has).  Any-dang-way,
  this guy plays a style of blues I was not familiar with until very recently.  All my blues experience before this was the standard Delta Blues of Robert Johnson and Skip James or the electric blues revival stuff like Elmore James and Muddy Waters.  It turns out there's a whole subgenre of blues music that sprang up right near my backyard.  North Mississippi Hill Country Blues is a wholly separate beast with it's own sound.  It's hard to explain but it isn't as reliant on the 12 bar blues progression like the Delta Blues.  It's more static harmonically.  Burnside's music showcases this and I've just really been drawn to this stuff. The fact that it evolved only a couple of hours away from my hometown also excites me.  It gives me a more solid connection to this music.  Acoustic Blues is my favorite kind and I found an entire album of Burnside recording his 'hits' acoustically with little-to-no accompaniment. By the sound of his voice it was toward the end of his career.  His guitar work is hypnotic and  rhythmically complicated, percussive even.  Check it:

Cryin' Won't Make Me Stay

R.L Burnside

As previously mentioned, I was booked for a solo acoustic gig some weeks back.  The time for my first paid gig in quite a long time is rapidly approaching.  The set list has remained largely untouched except for me dropping a couple of songs that I didn't have time to work up.  

The official details are thus:

• I'll be the entertainment at an outdoor home and garden art festival. 
  
• I'm playing three 45 minute sets at 1, 2 , and 3 o'clock. 
  
• I will be rocking the house.

The set will consist of a lot of old blues, some classic rock, some newer stuff, and even some old school country music. They were pretty open about what I could play so I just decided to make a collection of songs I'd like to hear.  There's a decent chance other people out there would like it too.  If they don't, they can choke down a great big can of I Don't Give A Damn.

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