12 January 2017 - Dr. JOHN - NEW ORLEANS BLUES

Dr. JOHN

- NEW ORLEANS BLUES -

G'day folks,

Malcolm John "Mac" Rebennack, better known by the stage name Dr. John, is an American singer, songwriter, pianist, and guitarist, whose music combines blues, pop, jazz, zydeco, boogie woogie and rock and roll.

Mac Rebennack proved that funk truly is the best medicine. Known better by his medical moniker, Dr. John is the greatest living musical ambassador of the Crescent City. The buoyant, eccentric, oddball singer embodies the boundary-breaking, genre-bending, foot-stomping, voodoo stew that is New Orleans music.

In spite of his self-appointed title, the good Dr. was never much of a student. He attended a Jesuit high school, but fared poorly because he spent his nights playing guitar in the city’s booming after-hours scene. That—and the fact that he was usually stoned out of his gourd—did not help his grades. When the Jesuit fathers offered him a choice between his studies and his music, he ended his formal relationship with school and gleaned much of his education from the pimps, prostitutes, and hustlers that surrounded him.

There was one teacher who had an impact on Mac. New Orleans boogie woogie pianist Professor Longhair attracted the young guitarist’s attention with his joyful bounce and his flashy attire. Like Mac, Professor Longhair did not come by his title through formal schooling, but few in New Orleans would question the man’s authority. Mac cut his teeth backing the Professor and other local legends in his early teens.

Though his career was just getting started, Mac’s guitar-playing days came to an end early. While coming to the defense of a bandmate in a bar brawl during a Jackson, Mississippi, gig, Mac’s finger was blown off by a gunshot. It was then that he adopted the piano. After moving to L.A. and adopting his stage name, Dr. John became a member of the famed Wrecking Crew, a roster of L.A.’s most sought-after studio musicians.

Dr. John backed artists as diverse as Sonny & Cher, Canned Heat, and Frank Zappa, while forging his own identity as “The Night Tripper,” a shamanic, psychedelic, hoodoo man whose live performances drew equally on bayou country medicine shows of the 19th century and the monster-movie performance-art of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. On his 1968 debut, Gris Gris, Dr. John stirred up a hallucinogenic potion of psychedelic smoke, Santería chanting, and Frenchman’s Street bounce.

In spite of a lifelong struggle with addiction, Dr. John was compulsively prolific, producing a raft of critically embraced and alluringly strange records through the 1970s. With the end the psychedelic era, albums like Dr. John’s Gumbo (1972) and In the Right Place (1973) represented a concerted shift in direction. Both would become Big Easy standards. It was along this path that Dr. John would ultimately stride for much of his career, incorporating the jazz, rock, blues, funk, and zydeco around him and ultimately authoring a style that can only be described as his. Often imitated but never equaled, this Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, winner of six Grammy Awards, and honorary Doctor (finally) of Fine Arts courtesy of Tulane University, is New Orleans music.

 

Clancy's comment: I love blues, but sadly have never made it to New Orleans. 

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21 December 2016 - JAMES COTTON - BLUES MASTER

JAMES COTTON

- BLUES MASTER -

G'day folks,

Welcome to the life of a blues master. James Henry Cotton is an American blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter, who has performed and recorded with many of the great blues artists of his time and with his own band.

 James Cotton is one of the very last of a dying breed—the Delta Bluesman. Of the genres represented on this list, perhaps none is so ravaged by time. We have precious few living links to the world they inhabited. That James Cotton is still alive is a fact to be cherished. Born in Tunica, Mississippi, Cotton’s first exposure to music was through his mother Hattie’s harmonica playing. Though she was not particularly adept at the instrument, her playing fascinated James. He received his first harp for Christmas one year and quickly surpassed his first mentor.

Like many of the black families living in the segregated Delta, Cotton’s family worked as sharecroppers. Because he was too young to cut cotton, he sat in the shade and played music for his parents and siblings as they worked the fields. He took his first great leap as a musician when he first heard Sonny Boy Williamson on the radio. The legendary Williamson had gained widespread fame through his King Biscuit Time broadcasts and Cotton became one of his most avid admirers.

At the age of nine, Cotton suddenly lost both of his parents. His uncle, showing a remarkable prescience, took the boy to nearby Helena, Arkansas, to meet his idol. Williamson informally adopted the recently orphaned Cotton and made him his opening act. Cotton was far too young to enter the juke joints they played, but earned his tips by blowing harmonica on the front stoops.

When Williamson’s band unraveled, Cotton journeyed to Memphis and earned his way through his teenage years as a street performer and shoeshiner. One night, Cotton caught wind of a Howlin’ Wolf performance in town. He rushed over with his harp, introduced himself, and before the age of 15, found himself on tour with another blues legend.

In 1954, when Cotton joined yet a third blues legend—Muddy Waters—he began an association that would last more than a decade, during which he would help cut some of Waters’s most iconic recordings. In the ‘60s, Cotton struck out on his own with the James Cotton Band, exploring similar psychedelic blues terrain as artists like Jimi Hendrix and Canned Heat. He doubled down on this transition by opening for Janis Joplin in 1967.

Over the course of the next several decades, James Cotton accompanied a mighty list of musicians, live and in studio, including Santana, B.B. King, the Grateful Dead, and Taj Mahal. Cotton was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2006 and remains a flesh-and-blood connection to the ghosts of blues lore. James Cotton is the greatest living blues harpist, a title he defends by performing live even to this day.

Clancy's comment: Another very talented man, and still performing. Man, you have to love that sort of passion.

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