THIRSTY EAR: SATURDAY

I got back from Denver about 9:45 p.m. Friday and next thing I knew it was time for the Thirsty Ear Music Festival Saturday morning.

My role at the festival this year is different than ever before. In most past years I've worked with Jeff Dowd and others at the KSFR booth at the festival. A couple of the early years of the festival I played with my old band The Charred Remains at one of the second stages. I think the only time I went just to hear the music was the first one, back in 1999.

But this year, I'm involved with the KSFR/ Southwest Stages broadcast of the festival. (Check it out: We're broadcasting live between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. tonight on KSFR -- plus we're streaming on the Web during that time. (On Saturday we were simulcasting with KUNM, but not today.)

So for much of the time, I was back in the mobile Southwest Stages studio providing some yak between the music with Dowd and Laurell Reynolds of KSFR, mostly listening to the acts on stage via the radio.

Some of the time this was disconcerting. There was a 9-second delay, so you could hear the real-time performance outside as the radio blasted what had been played onstage 9 seconds before. Pretty surreal.

There was some great music though.

I got to the Eaves Ranch right at the end of Little Freddie King's set. (He's a New Orleans bluesman who used to play with Freddie "The Texas Cannonball" King.)

Fortunately I got to see most of the set by Hundred Year Flood. This was the first time I'd seen them since the night Kendra's baby was born. I had to miss Frogfest because of the DNC.)

How is it that this band just seems to be getting better and better. I didn't recognize a couple of the tunes they played early in the set, so I assumed they were from their upcoming album, Poison. But no, Frogville strongman John Treadwell told me that these are songs that have never made it onto an album. I bet they already have enough tunes for another album or two ready to go.

Shemekia Copeland, daughter of Texas blues great Johnny "Clyde" Copeland was up next. (That's her in the photo at the top of this post.) She gave a stomping , funky performance.

And she might have made at least one convert. My son has never been much of a blues freak (even though I have his picture sitting in T-Model Ford's lap at the first Thirsty Ear Festival nine years ago) , but he was enraptured by Shemekia.

There's hope for the youth of America!

Richard Thompson was up next on the main stage, doing a solo acoustic set. I've seen him solo, I've seen him alone with bassist Danny Thompson and once even saw him with a full band (back in 1988 at Club West here in Santa Fe.) He always gives a satisfying show.

I wish I could have been outside in front of the stage more when Thompson performed yesterday. The most memorable tune I was able to catch was his anti-war song "Dad's Gonna Kill Me" and it was powerful.

New Mexico blues guitarist Ryan McGarvey closed the show. He was called in at the last minute to substitute for zydeco princess Rosie Ledet, who couldn't make it reportedly due to illness.

There's a cool line up today, including Junior Brown, Buckwheat Zydeco and Patty Griffin. Maybe see you there.

UPDATE Forgot to put in the link to my Thirsty Ear '08 photos.

HAPPY RETIREMENT, 3D DANNY

I meant to post this earlier this week. My friend Ray in Oklahoma City sent me this link about Danny Williams retiring from KOMA radio at the tender age of 81.

He probably was my first TV hero. In the '50s he hosted a classic kiddie show on WKY-TV that featured the wonderfully low-budget adventures of 3-D Danny -- that's Dan D. Dynamo -- a space traveler.

In the '60s he became Xavier T. Willard on The Foreman Scotty show. Scotty was a cowboy, while "Willie" was his crusty sidekick.

Later in the '60s Danny also had an afternoon talk/variety show on WKY, Danny's Day. Williams boasts that he once interviewed President Lyndon B. Johnson on his show.

But even more impressive was that he had my band, The Ramhorn City Go-Go Squad & Uptight Washtub Band in early 1968.

My first encounter with Williams though was in his role as 3-D Danny. I probably was four years old when Danny did a live shooting of his show at Wedgewood amusement park. The day before he warned his viewers on TV if they saw the evil robot (whose name I forget) sneaking up on 3D Danny and Foreman Scotty, WARN THEM!

That day at Wedgewood, sure enough, the evil robot was about to attack. Scared out of my wits, I ran out on the set screaming and crying, telling my heros to look out. Remember, this was in the days of live TV. I'm sure the crew hated me for screwing up the scene, but Danny and Scotty (Steve Powell) were really cool in comforting me.

One other Danny Williams connection. When you hear me say, "Watch out for flying chairs" at the end of Terrell's Sound World every week, I got that from Danny, who hosted Live Wrestling on Saturday nights on WKY. The phrase became his weekly signoff after getting beaned in a chair-throwing orgy in a match one night.

Enjoy your retirement, Danny. And thanks for taking a hit frm that chair so I wouldn't have to.

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: THIS SONG'S FOR THE WORKIN' MAN

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
August 29, 2008

Like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Halloween, Labor Day’s meaning has been obscured by time. For most folks, it’s a day off and symbolizes the end of summer — which is kind of dumb, because summer doesn’t actually end until Sept. 20 or so, and the start of school, which is summer’s end for most kids, is in late August in many places.

Labor Day, which became a federal holiday in 1894, was originally meant to honor all working people — not presidents, not any individual. And it wasn’t associated with any religious tradition. But yes, the day off with pay was part of the deal. Why no “Bosses’ Day”? Look at corporate salaries, and you’ll realize that every day is Bosses’ Day.

This country has a proud history of labor songs and songwriters. Joe Hill, leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, whose ghost appeared to Paul Robeson and Joan Baez in dreams, wrote some classics like “There Is Power in a Union,” “Rebel Girl,” and “Casey Jones: Union Scab.” Woody Guthrie wrote (or perhaps co-wrote) “Union Maid” and “Ludlow Massacre.” And we can’t forget Utah Phillips, who died earlier this year. He sang lots of labor songs and, in the 1990s, recorded two albums with Ani DiFranco — Fellow Workers and The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere — filled with original and classic labor tunes.

Here’s a list of my favorite songs for Labor Day. Most of them you won’t find in union songbooks, which is too bad.

1. “Plenty Tuff, Union Made” by The Waco Brothers. Sung by Jon Langford, this rockabilly rouser is a punchy, high-energy anthem. The song is about hard times, but there’s joy in the struggle, and ultimately it’s an optimistic tune. “I don’t think the king woke up one morning/Said all people should be better paid (no!)/Things were bad but things got changed/Plenty tough, union made.”

2. “Working Man’s Blues” by Merle Haggard. This country classic captures a lot of the conflicted sentiments and impulses of modern American workers. And with the opening line, “It’s a hard job just gettin’ by with nine kids and a wife,” it could serve as propaganda for Planned Parenthood.

3. “Sweetheart on the Barricade” by Richard Thompson and Danny Thompson. This tune, from Richard and Danny’s (no relation to each other, by the way) 1997 album Industry, owes much to Woody Guthrie’s “Union Maid,” with the added element of romance. Richard picked up on the sexual energy of the struggle for decent wages and working conditions: “My heart, it skips a beat/There’ll be fighting in the street/My sweetheart’s on the barricade.”

4. “Union Song” by Carter Falco. It’s not surprising that this Steve Earle-influenced song wasn’t embraced by the Nashville establishment. Lyrics like “I’m headin’ into tear gas, dig in, man, hold your ground” tend to scare corporate bosses in any industry. Falco curses “dirty scabs who cross the line” as well as cops firing rubber bullets at strikers. And he sings praises to César Chávez, Joe Hill, and all “union men and women standin’ up and standin’ strong.”

5. “Red Neck, Blue Collar” by James Luther Dickinson. This song, written by Bob Frank, is the highlight of Memphis veteran Dickinson’s 2006 Jungle Jim and the Voodoo Tiger album. It’s not a glorification of the working class but a frustrated look at how so many working-class folks are systematically fooled into backing politicians and political positions that are contrary to their own economic interests.

6. “Lawrence Jones” by Kathy Mattea. This is the most powerful song from Mattea’s concept album Coal, released early this year. It was written by folk singer/organizer Si Kahn and deals with the bloody 13-month miners’ strike that began in 1973 in Harlan County, Kentucky. As documented in Barbara Kopple’s influential documentary Harlan County U.S.A., Jones was fatally shot.

7. “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?” by The Del-Lords. This tune was written by West Virginia hillbilly bard Blind Alfred Reed at the outset of the Great Depression. It’s a screed against high prices, bad schools, trigger-happy cops, crooked preachers, and doctors who dispense “a dose of dope and a great big bill.” All these things were still around in the 1980s when New York’s Del-Lords ripped into it and made it rock.

8. “Mr. President (Have Pity on the Working Man)” by Randy Newman. This song comes from the album Good Old Boys, which was released in 1974, so I always assumed the lyrics were aimed at Richard Nixon. “We’re not askin’ you to love us/You may put yourself high above us/Mr. President, have pity on the working man.”

9. “Don’t Look Now (It Ain’t You or Me)” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. In this rockabilly tune, John Fogerty takes a poke at the elitism found in too many hipster circles in the late ’60s. As Fogerty explained in a Rolling Stone interview: “We’re all so ethnic now, with our long hair and shit. But, when it comes to doing the real crap that civilization needs to keep it going ... who’s going to be the garbage collector? None of us will. Most of us will say, ‘That’s beneath me, I ain’t gonna do that job.’”

10. “Big Boss Man” by Jimmy Reed. “You got me working, boss man, working ’round the clock/I want me a drink of water, but you won’t let Jimmy stop.” The sentiments of this venerated blues song are so universal. I can imagine a movie about the construction of the Pyramids. One of the slaves stops his work, looks up, and begins to sing: “Big boss man, don’t you hear when I call?”

Workin’ man radio: Hear these songs and lots more when Stan Rosen joins me at 10 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 7, for Terrell’s Sound World’s annual post-Labor Day show (on KSFR-FM 101.1). As always, we’ll focus on songs about workers and the labor movement.

OBAMA SPEAKS

MADELYN & ME

Look who I ran into shortly before Richardson's speech.