Guess I'm Dumb says "I’ll admit that the reason I listened to this cool blues track was that I liked the name Schoolboy Cleve. But Cleveland White’s harp playing and the groove kept me coming back.
New additions to our digital archive: Dietrich Wawzyn’s documentaries on American blues and hillbilly music.
In 1963, Chris Strachwitz accompanied German filmmaker Dietrich Wawzyn on a trip throughout the United States to document American roots music. The results of this trip were short documentaries made for German television featuring American blues and country musicians. “50 Sterne in Musik: Blues” includes Willie B. Thomas, Mance Lipscomb, Black Ace Turner, Alexander Moore, Lightnin' Hopkins, Buster Pickens, Barbara Dane, Jesse Fuller, and Lowell Fulson. “50 Sterne in Musik: Hillbilly” includes J.E. Mainer and his Mountaineers, the Hodges Brothers, the Lewis Family, the Willis Brothers, the Goodtime Washboard Three, and Blind James Campbell and his Nashville Street Band. These documentaries are now available on archive.arhoolie.org.
In this clip, Jesse Fuller plays “San Francisco Bay Blues” on guitar, harmonica, kazoo, and fotdella (a string bass instrument played with a foot pedal–Fuller’s own invention). From “50 Sterne in Musik: Blues” (1963)
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees”.
[William Blake from his communications with the Reverend John Trusler, 1799]
Sometimes it’s enough just to stand within a woodland and let imagination run wild. To seek out complex structures that depend upon each other to maintain their shape and form. Passageways and footpaths that might lead to familiar places or to other worlds. It’s the imperfect geometry of landscape I look for. The asymmetry of trees; the random intrusions of other flora; the invisible hand of homo sapiens…and the way that sunlight will always seek to create a strange geometry beneath a canopy of chaos.
“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life…”