Well when you are camping and have a morning spare there is nothing better than to stroll through the fabulous gardens with the colourful hues, strange plants, scents, bees buzzing and butterflies bobbing. It blows the fumes and noise of the city right out of your system.
What other festival offers such a delight?
I love the blues. I never grow tired of playing this stuff. It was thought too crude and sexual to play to white audiences. They played it on Black radio and sold it on ‘Race’ records. Us poor Whites were deprived. Sit back and enjoy the music
I love Chicago Blues. It is seminal.
Straight out of the Louisiana swamps on to my turntable via J D Miller’s production at Excello. That was the feel of Slim Harpo. He produced that electric, mesmerising Jimmy Reed beat to create a bayou drenched blues with a laid back vocal. I discovered him on an album called something like authentic swamp blues. Along with stable mates Lonesome Sundown, Lazy Lester and Lightnin’ Slim they churned the muddy green waters of Louisiana blues to create a primordial soup of sound which was compulsive. The guitars rumbled and reverberated and vocals whined. It was electric music from the rural backwaters. It was redolent of those sweaty humid southern nights in crude wooden shacks beside the murky green swamps with the croaking frogs where the dudes strutted and preened like peacocks and the mamas grinded and bumped to that insistent beat.
Slim Harpo grooved and growled through numbers like ‘Got love if you want it’, ‘I’m a King Bee’ and ‘Shake your hips’. He was the best of the bunch and inspired the Stones, Kinks and Yardbirds. Unfortunately he never got to perform in England but I did get to see Lazy Lester and have a limited talk about those early days. He was a bit surly, taciturn and reticent but then he was a lover and not a fighter.
I did get to see Slim’s grave while in Baton Rouge. He had a tomb with a slab over the top with the name James Moore inscribed on it. The tomb was heavily overgrown with great gnarled roots growing out of it. Slim was going back to the swamps he’d come from.
Slim Harpo should be revered the world over.
For me you can trace Rock right back to its roots in acoustic blues from the 1930s. Bo Carter might not be the best but he is one of the 1930s Blues singers that I greatly enjoy. His risqué Blues would have seemed quite shocking.
A lot of the Blues we have recorded was sanitised for general output. The Blues came from rural areas in Mississippi and Louisiana and was the music of the hard-working sharecropping families who worked there. It served many functions – as work-songs – to speed up the repetitive labour in the fields – as dance songs at the country barbeques – as busking songs in the streets – as songs for entertainment in the bars and brothels – and as protest and cathartic anger. I think a lot of these never saw the light of day. They were considered too dangerous to risk putting on vinyl. Life was dangerous in those days.
Bo Carter was performing back in the early 1930s and specialised in risqué acoustic Blues songs with double. His guitar playing is very highly developed rag-time style. This album, as the name suggests, is full of these type of songs. Some of them are very amusing and some highly inventive. It includes such gems as ‘My pencil won’t write no more’, ‘Pussy cat blues’, ‘Don’t mash my digger so deep’, ‘Pin in your cushion’ and ‘What kind of scent is this?’
If you are enjoying or at all enlightened by these, rather idiosyncratic, list of brilliant albums why not purchase the book and see what other undiscovered gems it might expose (along with some of the more well-known albums). You might find it well worth a fiver.
