THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, June 5, 2009
KSFR, Santa Fe, NM
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell

101.1 FM
email me during the show! terrell@ksfr.org

OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens & The Buckaroos
It Just Dawned on Me by John Doe & The Sadies
Country Woman by The Cals
21 Days in Jail by The Blasters
Ramblin' Man by Soda
Memphis Yodel by Jimmie Rodgers
Yodelin' Rhythm and Blues by Halden Wofford & The Hibeams
Rebel Rock Armageddon by The Riptones
Let it Simmer by Dan Hicks & The Hot Licks
Cool and Dark Inside by Kell Robertson

Working at Working by Wayne Hanock
I'm Sending Daffydills by The Maddox Brothers & Rose
Rockin' Spot by Cody Coldiron
I'm Mad by Rev. Horton Heat
I Hung it Up by Junior Brown
Let Me Be the Judge by Amber Digby
Hold My Feet to the Fire by Ha Ha Tonka
Lost Highway by Scott H. Biram
Bonapart's Retreat by Holy Modal Rounders

One Toke Over the Line by Brewer & Shipley
Red Hot Gal of Mine by Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys
What Makes Bob Holler by Tom Morrell & The Time Warp Tophands
Trouble in Mind by Jon Langford & The Pine Valley Cosmonauts
Roly Poly by Merle Haggard
Jenna by Zeno Tornado & The Boney Google Brothers
Surftango by Ruthie & The Wranglers
O Rings by The Gourds

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Laura Cantrell
Free the Wind by The Flatlanders
Unorganized Crime by Todd Snyder
Nana and Jimi by Dave Alvin & The Guilty Women
Angels Rejoiced Lat Night by Gram Parsons & Emmylou Harris
Beautiful William by The Handsome Family
I'm So Proud by Dan Penn
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

Steve Terrell is proud to report to the monthly Freeform American Roots Radio list

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: YOUNG BLACK JOE

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
June 5, 2009

One of the healthiest retro trends lately is the ongoing neo-soul revival.

I’m talking about Sharon Jones, Lee Fields, and their colleagues at Daptone Records. I’m talking about King Khan & The Shrines. I’m talking about the continued adventures of inspired old timers like Bettye LaVette, Howard Tate, and Solomon Burke. And now I’m talking about a wild little band from Austin, Texas, called Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears.

Young Black Joe and his group just released their first major label (Lost Highway) album, Tell ’em What Your Name Is. And it just might be the debut of the year.

This band — led by 20-something singer Lewis, who, according to a recent account in Spin, still has a day job delivering seafood — falls somewhere between the tight-but-gritty Daptone sound and the crazy, horny punk-funk of King Khan.

Lewis and the Bears don’t see soul music as some fragile museum exhibit to be reverently emulated. It’s a Saturday night fish fry that never ends. The horn section is loud, the guitar has a bite, and the organist sounds as if he’s been force-fed a steady diet of Jimmy Smith and The Animals. And Lewis shouts like Otis Redding’s long-lost grandson.

The opening song, a stomper called “Gunpowder” sets the pace for the album. It clocks in just over two minutes (the longest one here is barely over four minutes) and goes right into another hard-charger called “Sugarfoot.”

“Big Booty Woman” comes closest to being a blues song. It’s followed by “Boogie,” which sounds like Slim Harpo on trucker’s crank. (In fact, Lewis borrows from Harpo’s “Shake Your Hips.”)

My favorite has to be the funky and delightfully obscene “Get Yo Shit."

It starts out when the singer comes home to all find his, uh, belongings scattered on the front lawn. He knows it has to be the work of “that crazy ass girl of mine.” A confrontation ensues. She’s feeling unloved. “You don’t even buy me presents,” she says. The narrator retorts, “I bought you a box of chicken, but I ate it on the way home.” The unimpressed paramour continues: “You don’t even know my name.” Black Joe answers, “Yeah, it’s ‘Melissa.’” To which she replies, “No, dumb ass, it’s ‘Roxanne.”

Uh oh.

Incredibly the singer is about to weasel some make-up sex out of this bad situation. But a surprise visit from the police ruins the mood.

One song that’s completely different from the rest is the haunting “Master Sold My Baby.” It’s a swampy chant over drums suggesting a New Orleans march.

Probably the most intense song on Tell ’em is the closing track, “Please Pt. Two” (There’s no “Pt. One.”) The song fades in to what sounds like a crisis in progress. The Honeybears are playing full blast and Lewis is “down on my knees, begging you please.” It doesn’t matter what the song is about. This is the sound of music at its toughest. It sounds like it might have come from a live show. My only regret is that I wasn’t there.

If I’ve got one complaint about Tell ’em What Your Name Is, it’s the brevity. The whole thing is just over a half hour long.

When I wrote this column last week, Amazon.com was offering the MP3 version of the album for only $5. In the meantime, it's gone up to $6.99.

If you explore around Amazon, you’ll find Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears’ self-titled EP, released earlier this year, which has two songs (The blues-fed “Bitch, I Love You” and the acoustic shaggy-dog hoodoo tale called “Cousin Randy,” featuring slide guitar) that aren’t on the Tell ’em album. I’m not sure why they didn’t make the CD, but through the miracle of technology, you can put ’em there yourself.

And you can find Black Joe’s earlier work at CD Baby, HERE and HERE.

Also recommended:

* What Have You Done, My Brother? by Naomi Shelton & the Gospel Queens. Speaking of Daptone, the latest offering from this influential New York label is a gospel record by an Alabama-born singer who has gone back and forth between sanctified songs and secular soul.

This is a solid, old-school gospel record — in other words, none of the synthy glitz overkill of contemporary gospel — in which Shelton is backed by a small band featuring organ, piano, guitar, bass, and drums. There’s also a female chorus, which, at least on some tracks, includes the mighty Sharon Jones (who proved her gospel music skills on the unheralded soundtrack album for the movie The Great Debaters, which also featured bluesman Alvin Youngblod Hart and traditionalists The Carolina Chocolate Drops).

Though never achieving real fame, Shelton knocked around the music biz since the 1960s. She’s got a rich, throaty voice that’s held up well through the years.

My current favorite tracks here include “What Have You Done?,” an accusatory song aimed at some unnamed sinner (”You’re twisted, you thought you were clever/But your wicked tongue can’t twist forever, “ Shelton sings sternly) and “I’ll Take the Long Road,” a slow Southern-fried soul-gospel ballad in which guitarist Bosco Mann sounds as if he’s paying tribute to Steve Cropper.

Shelton does a decent version of Sam Cooke’s overcovered “A Change Is Gonna Come.” But for me the real climax of the album is the preceding song, “Lift Up My Burdens,” which has echoes of The Impressions’ “People Get Ready” — as well as Howard Tate’s’ “Get it While You Can.”

KOKO TAYLOR 1928-2009

Koko Taylor, the Queen of the Chicago Blues died yesterday at the age of 80.

Here's a story in the L.A. Times.

And below is a video of her performing with Little Walter. And below that is a blip of her duet with Willie Dixon, "Insane Asylum."

Rest in peace, Koko.

BOB WILLS REVOLT!

There's a cool little movement afloat in Tulsa, Okla. -- the Bob Wills Revolt.

A Tulsa printer named Lee Roy Chapman says the area of town -- where the famed Cain Ballroom is -- now called The Brady Arts District, should be re-named the Bob Wills District.

The district is named after an early 20th Century civic leader named Tate Brady. According to a story in today's Urban Tulsa Weekly:

Brady--one of the original incorporators of Tulsa after moving here from Missouri in 1890 to open a mercantile store--eventually built the Hotel Brady, a favored gathering spot of oil men and Democratic politicians, according to the state Historical Society. He married a prominent Cherokee woman and later was adopted into the nation, becoming one of its strongest advocates in Washington, D.C.

But Chapman sees a much darker side to Brady's personality, one that isn't often acknowledged in discussions of his role as one of the city's early boosters. Chapman charges that Brady led a land grab in the Greenwood area in the aftermath of the 1921 race riot, supported segregation as a leader of the state Democratic Party during the Constitutional Convention and served as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Brady's involvement in the KKK is disputed, the article points out.

The Bob Wills Revolt has a Web site HERE. There;s a Facebook group HERE.

By the way, the article in the Tulsa Urban Weekly is written by Mike Easterling, formerly of The Journal North and the Santa Fe band The Couch Burners.

eMUSIC: WHAT A REVOLTIN' DEVELOPMENT

As longtime readers of this blog know, I've been a rabid defender of the music download subscription service eMusic. I faithfully post each month's downloads in hopes that readers can appreciate, and maybe even try out some of the cool obscure and forgotten stuff I find. A lot of the stuff you hear on my radio shows and my podcasts came from eMusic.

Heck I even put up with their weird typos, their blockheaded way they assign genres to selections (For the record, Rufus Thomas is NOT "hip hop"!) and even mixing up track names -- all because there's so much good stuff there at such a great price.

For the record, my current plan gives me 90 downloads a month for $19.99. It's a plan that was grandfathered in after their rate hike a couple of years ago.

I saw this week's announcement that eMusic had struck a deal with Sony -- a major label that swallowed up Columbia as well as BMG (which I stubbornly still refer to as RCA, praise Elvis) and other labels -- as a mixed blessing.

No, I don't give a flying darn about some of the old Sony acts -- Billy Joel, Journey, Whitney Houston. And most the coolhipindiepunk acts they're touting like The Sex Pistols and The Clash is stuff I already have.

But there are a lot of cool old blues, jazz and hillbilly acts going back to the '20s -- that's 1920s, kids, that were on Columbia (which swallowed up Okeh Records way back when). So, assuming they offer this as well as Michael Jackson and Eddie Money, that's a good thing.

But one little detail the press release kind of forgot to mention.

Along with the massive Sony back catalog, there's also a little matter of a price increase.

For my plan, I'll be going from 90 downloads to 50 downloads every 30 days. Doing the math, my price for a download goes up from about 22 cents to about 40 cents.

Granted, 40 cents still is a lot cheaper than Amazon, iTunes or any place else I know. So I might swallow my pride and stick around, even though it's really tempting to tell them to stick it. One thing for certain -- there will be a lot less experimenting on my part, making it a lot less likely I stumble across and take a chance on acts like Impala, Ross Johnson and Isaiah Owens, and albums like Rarities from The Bob Hite Vaults or Slide Guitar Gospel (1944-1964).

For the record , eMusic claims the price increase was in the works before the Sony deal. You still have to wonder.

Here's a couple of articles about the eMusic changes from the Los Angeles Times and Business Week.

********

I've been excited about the new Norton compilation I Still Hate CDs for a couple of months now. It was released Tuesday, so I happily downloaded the 38 (of 45) tracks I didn't already have.

So imagine my disappointment when I discovered that seven of the tracks I downloaded are marred by an obnoxious scratchy digital distortion. (Apparently another track, "Camel Walk" by The Saxons is the same way. I didn't download that one because I already had it on one of the Mad Mike's Monsters collection on Norton.

I'm sure eMusic will credit my account. I just hope they replace those those lousy tracks pronto. (Miriam at Norton says she's contacted their download company about the problem.)

An honest mistake I'm sure. But happening today sure didn't make me feel any better about eMusic.