537 Essential Rock Albums – Bo Carter – Banana in Your Fruit Basket
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.
- Bo Carter – Banana in Your Fruit Basket
A lot of the Blues we have recorded were 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 a very highly developed rag-time style. This album, as the name suggests, is full of these types of songs. Some of them are very amusing and some are 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 this, 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.