Friday, November 6, 2015 KSFR, Santa Fe, NM Webcasting! 10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time Host: Steve Terrell 101.1 FM Email me during the show! terrel(at)ksfr.org Here's my playlist : OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens
Semi Truck by Commander Cody
The One That Got Away by Legendary Shack Shakers
Beaten and Broken by Robbie Fulks & The Mini-Mekons
Apartment 34 by Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs
Monkey on the Moon by Gene Hall
Pardon Me I've Got Someone to Kill by Andre Williams & The Sadies
Pappa's on the Rooftop by Dave & Phil Alvin
Scorched by The Satellites
Pick a Bale of Cotton by Flathead If There Wasn't Any Cows by Luke Reed
All Dressed Up for Trial by Peter Case
Big Fat Love by John Prine
Big Old Pussy Cat by John Riggs
Living With the Animals by Mother Earth
Big Fat Nuthiin' by Bottle Rockets
Tom Dooley by Bobby Bare
(All songs by Kell except where noted)
Cool and Dark Inside
Guns, Guitars and Women
Go On Home by Jason Eklund, Mike Good & Tom Irwin
Mary's Bar
Star Motel Blues Wine Spodee Odee
Down the Bar From Me
I Always Loved a Waltz
I'll Walk Around Heaven With You by Blonde Boy Grunt & The Groans
Emotional Needs by Uncle Monk
My Side by Electric Rag Band
The Long Way Home by Hot Club of Cowtown
Worried Mind by Eilen Jewell
Lonesome Suzie by The Band
The Ballad of Maverick by George Thorogood
Let the Mermaids Flirt With Me by Mississippi John Hurt CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets Like the Santa Fe Opry Facebook page Subscribe to The Big Enchilada Podcast! CLICK HERE Steve Terrell is proud to report to the monthly Freeform American Roots Radio list
Kell Robertson live at the Oasis, Santa Fe circa 2004
Four years ago this Saturday, Nov. 7, Kell Robertson, poet, songwriter, country singer, storyteller and self-described old drunk left this world at the age of 81.
You don't know Kell Robertson? Well educate yourself, dammit! Read the profile I did on him for No Depression in 2004. Read the obituary I did for him in The New Mexican four years ago. And please lose yourself in the wonderful website some of his friends put together for Kell.
I still think about the old troublesome desert rat all the time. I think about his stories, his b.s., his phone calls that always seemed to come when I needed a good laugh. And I especially think about those soulful songs he left behind.
Here are a couple of those tunes that have popped up on YouTube
We'll start with "I'll Probably Live."
This next one, "Cool and Dark Inside," has always been my personal favorite of all his songs. And this video is nice because it's got footage of Kell at Mary's Bar in Cerrillos.
And this is a song he sang on my radio show, The Santa Fe Opry back in 2008. "Wine Spodee Odee," of course is not a Kell original. But there's no denying he put his own unique stamp on it. I turned it into a video just a few days ago, using some snapshots I'd taken of the man.
And here's a radio feature the late Joe Day did about him right after he died. (We also lost Joe earlier this year. Damn I get tired of writing obits about my friends!)
I'll be commemorating Kell on tonight's Santa Fe Opry. It's on KSFR, 101.1 FM or www.ksfr.org at 10 p.m. Mountain Time. Come on in. It's cool and dark inside.
It was 49 years ago this week when the world lost a gentle Goliath of American music, Mississippi John Hurt.
Born in the 1890s to a sharecropping family in Carroll County, Miss., Hurt taught himself to play guitar. Though agriculture was the way he earned his living, he sometimes played at parties in and around his Avalon, Miss. home. Hurt recorded 12 songs for Okeh Records. They didn't sell well. Okeh went broke during the Depression Hurt went back to farming.
But in 1952, two of his songs -- "Frankie" and "Spike Driver Blues" -- appeared on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, exposing Hurt to a wider, whiter audience
And then came the wild rush of the early '60s folk boom, when roving armies of young record collectors combed the rural South searching for authentic old blues and hillbilly recording artists of yore. Hurt living near his hometown of Avalon, Miss. was found by musicologist Tom Hoskins.
Soon Mississippi John was the star of folk festivals and the big city coffee-house circuit, appearing on the same bills as "re-discovered' bluesmen like Son House and Skip James. His self-taught, syncopated finger-picking style was studied, copied and celebrated by a new generation of guitarists.
I didn't discover John Hurt until about three years after he died. In 1970, when I was a senior in high school, I decided I needed to start listening to some actual blues music.
For years I was familiar with names like John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and B.B. King by way of blues-soaked rock bands like The animals, The Rolling Stones and, later Canned Heat and Cream. And several years before I'd seen Howlin' Wolf play on Shindig with the Stones at his feet. But I didn't have any actual blues records in my collection. So that Christmas I asked my mom to get me a blues album -- any blues album.
Mom was fairly hip for someone of her era. She gave me my first Bob Dylan album, Bringing it All Back Home, before I'd even heard of the guy. But she was not a blues scholar. So to make sure I got a decent blues record for Christmas, she went downtown to The Candyman (which she didn't realize was named for a Mississippi John Hurt song!) and asked a clerk for a suggestion.
Whoever it was sold her a Hurt album (that later was reissued on CD under the title of Legend) that had a bunch of his greatest tunes including "Pay Day," "Louis Collins," "Trouble I Had All My Days," "Stack-O-Lee Blue" and a wistful little song of despair called "Let The Mermaids Flirt With Me."
No, it wasn't exactly the blues. Mississippi John's music was influenced by blues, gospel, ragtime, white hillbilly records and all sorts of sounds that drifted into rural Mississippi. While it wasn't exactly what I asked for, the album and the man playing album became favorites for life.
Thanks again, Mom!
To commemorate his death (Nov. 2, 1967) and to celebrate his life, here are a couple of videos of Mississippi John Hurt singing on Pete Seeger's TV showRainbow Quest,which originally aired on a New York UHF station.
Here's "You Got to Walk that Lonesome Valley:
Here's Hurt covering Leadbelly
And here's the song that remains my favorite to this day.
This following song is a tribute to Hurt written by Tom Paxton and recently revived by Jack White. But my favorite is the version by Dave Van Ronk, which I first heard when I saw him in Santa Fe in 1980.
And just in case you never heard him sing that "Candyman" ...
What comedians do best: Tell jokes, tell funny stories, make wisecracks, point out the absurd.
Notice what not is on that list is "sing songs."
Yet every now and then an American will decide to stretch out and make some sort of pop record. And sometimes these tunes even make the charts. Most the time these are novelty records, extensions of a funny man's comic personna.
Sometimes they're just absurd.
Here is a glance at that strange entertainment phenomenon.
Let's start with The Three Stooges. By the late 1950s, Curly Howard was dead, as was another Howard brother Schempp. Moe and Larry tried a third stooge named Joe Besser for a couple of years, but he didn't work out. Then they hooked up with a guy named Joe DeRita who bore a resemblance to Curly Howard. DeRita became known as "Curly Joe," and the final stage of the Three Stooges' lengthy career began.
By this point, with an eye on the television market, the Stooges were becoming more "kid friendly." (though as an actual kid, even then I vastly preferred the two-reel shorts from the '30s and '40s.) And in 1959, Moe Larry and Curly Joe went to the recording studio to make a children's album.
One of the songs was called "Swinging the Alphabet." It would appear on several of their 1960s records. But it wasn't a new song. The Stooges had performed it back in 1938 in a two-reeler called Violent is the Word for Curly. This is the version that lives in our hearts:
I'm not sure why Soupy Sales decided to record this dumb parody of teen-dance-craze hits in the mid '60s. The youth of America already loved him for his irreverent kiddie show, Lunch With Soupy Sales. But I have to admit I bought the damn 45 of "Do the Mouse" when I was a kid. I wish I still had it. Here's Soupy on Hullabaloo.
Bill Cosby (I know, I know) tried his hand at music in the mid '60s. He had a hit with "Little Old Man," which was based on Stevie Wonder's "Uptight." And this golden throat released an album called Silver Throat, which mostly consisted of funked up blues and soul standards. His "Mojo Workout" actually was a mutation of Muddy Waters' "I Got My Mojo Workin'." But now when you hear Cos singing, "I got my mojo workin' and I'm going to try it out on you" it sounds pretty ominous, now that we know what we know.
Rodney Dangerfield was born to rap. In 1983 he strung together a bunch of his greatest "No Respect" one-liners, made 'em rhyme and slapped on some early hip-hop beats and "Rappin' Rodney" was born. The video below, which appears to be part of some TV variety show, has cameos by Andy Kaufman and Robert Urich (who I first thought was Pete Rose until a friend set me straight).
Unlike Soupy and Rodney, comedian Eddie Murphy's mid '80s hit "Party All the Time" wasn't a novelty song. It was written by Rick James, bitch! And lately he's been recording reggae with Snoop Doggy Lion or whatever his name is. And it ain't bad. Below is that first Murphy hit.
The Stooges' musical career took a turn for the weird by the late '60s
Sunday, November 1, 2015 KSFR, Santa Fe, N.M. 10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time Host: Steve Terrell Webcasting! 101.1 FM
email me during the show! terrell(at)ksfr.org Here's the playlist OPENING THEME: Let It Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
KaBouri by Cankisou
Dumb All Over by Frank Zappa
Just a Little Bit by Jello Biafra & The Raunch and Soul All-Stars
Betty vs. the NYPD by Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Mr. Farmer by The Seeds
Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White by The Standells
Louise by Undercover Bonobos
Headlock on My Heart by The Fleshtones
Radar by Mr. Bear & His Bearcats
Gravy on My Mashed Potatoes by Dee Dee Sharp
Doing the Watusi by Mr. X
The Wah Watusi by The Orlons
I'm a Full-Grown Man by Barrence Whitfield
Fool in Love by Marcia Ball, Angela Strehli & Lou Ann Barton
Everybody Free by Alex Mairano & The Black Tales
Down in the Valley by Otis Redding
Get Right With God by The Mighty Blytheville Aires
Jesus is on The Mainline by The Whirlwinds
Soldiers of The Cross by Reverend Lonnie Farris
Holding His Hand by Leola Brown Radio Gospel Singers
Heard it Through the True Vine by Flora Molton
Sometimes I Feel Like I'm Already Gone by Rev. Johnny L. Jones
Come by Here by Hightower Brothers
Children Are You Ready by The Violinaires
Lord, Lord, Lord by The Apollos
Ain't it a Shame by Echos of Harmony
My Troubles Are So Hard by Ethel Davenport
All These Things by Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint
Heart of Stone by Joe Louis Walker
Johnny Mathis' Feet by American Music Club
Welfare Bread by King Khan & The Shrines Their Hearts Were Full of Spring by The Beach Boys CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis
