Paul Brady - Arthur McBride
[Dylan's Eightieth Birthday celebrated from Ireland]
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Woody Guthrie - Struggle (1941) | ZeroGSounds
Woody Guthrie - Struggle (1941)
Zero hat gesacht: This album was originally released by Moses Asch, founder of the Folkways label, on Asch Records in 1941 as "Struggle: Documentary No. 1".It was re-released by him in 1976 to commemorate the bicentennial of the American Revolution with a special series of liner notes by Asch explaining the importance of Woody Guthrie's history of the working class through song.
Both Guthrie's songs and the liner notes are stuff of supreme cultural importance. In the notes, Asch lays out a theory that the American Revolution has not yet been completed and there is a need for a "continuing struggle for human rights and equality."
As a collection of songs, this is surely one of the best Guthrie collections, especially once it's known how important it was to him personally. In many ways, it seems as if this album was the fulfillment of a very personal vision, which starts with the songs but is only realized in their collectivity.
Included here are such excellent songs as the unsettling "Hang Knot," the elliptic "Union Burying Ground," and the finely spun "Pretty Boy Floyd." These songs define Guthrie at his best, never didactic in tone but supreme in import. The album also features the Cisco Houston (Guthrie's sometime tramping companion) number "Get Along Little Doggies," as well as his vocal accompaniment on several tracks. Sonny Terry guests on "Lost John," lending his harmonica to Guthrie's tale of a chain gang escapee. Both as a historical artifact and as an amazing Guthrie album, this is required listening.
Broadcast - Where Youth and Laughter Go (Demo) [Distant Call] | jt1674
. . . . speaking of bands I don’t know!? . . .there is this they them! #trish keenan
Norah Jones - on her Jazz roots . . . . Jazz Times | Don’s Tunes
young young young here
Norah Jones remembers dancing around her bedroom to Mingus’ “Haitian Fight Song,” but was hit hardest by vocal-piano confessions: Billie Holiday’s 1952 version of “These Foolish Things” with Oscar Peterson; Sarah Vaughan’s way with “My Funny Valentine” “where the melody is all over the place,” heard on 1973’s Live in Japan. Jones went on to play alto saxophone in her teens as well as piano, and attended the same summer jazz camp as another future Blue Note artist, pianist Robert Glasper. “I grew up loving Billie, John Coltrane and Miles Davis,”
Jones goes on. “It made me feel something different, introspective. Part of why I love Miles is the space. That has suited me well as a musician-a lot of space.” She cites the trumpeter’s electric breakthrough, 1969’s In a Silent Way, one of her favourite Davis LPs. “It is not vocal balladry,” Jones notes. “But it is a moody little record.”
David Fricke / Jazz Times
Photo: Clay Patrick McBride (Maybe)
Birthdays: Sweet Gene Vincent (on what would have been his 91st!)
Gene Vincent was born in Norfolk, Virginia on this day in 1935. Be-bop-a-lula, she’s my baby.
Gene Vincent - Be-Bop-A-Lula (1956)
The Guvnor sums up . . . .
Ian remembers his idol, Gene Vincent, for The Tube (Channel 4, 11 January 1985, S3:Ep15), to commemorate what would have been Gene Vincent’s 50th birthday
Picture of the Day : Pink Floyd as 5 piece band
"For a brief period, in early 1968, Pink Floyd were a 5 piece with Dave Gilmour joining as a second guitarist, before Syd Barrett was sacked. This photo is from January 1968"
People often think or presume that David was brought in to replace Syd. Not the case, in fact, and Dave and Syd were schoolboy friends from the get go and before any other members of the band. It did of course happen, as you can I think tell here, that Syd’s acid [L.S.D.] burning out (largely through microdosing to excess I believe) was on the cards but days or at least weeks away . . . here
Josh White - Southern Exposure - An Album of Jim Crow Blues (1941) | Zero G Sounds
Joshua White - Southern Exposure - An Album of Jim Crow Blues (1941)
Zero hat gesacht: "The blues, contrary to popular conception, are not always concerned with love, razors, dice, and death," Richard Wright wrote in 1941, in the liner notes to a new album of 78 rpm records. "Southern Exposure contains the blues, the wailing blues, the moaning blues, the laughing-crying blues, the sad-happy blues. But it contains also the fighting blues . . ."Southern Exposure was the third album by Josh White, a young singer who was then staking out a unique position in American music: he was the only musician ever to make a name for himself singing political blues. Oddly, he made no claim to uniqueness; like Wright, he argued that the blues was by its nature a protest music, and decades of writers on the subject would concur. They always pointed, though, to veiled verses like "You don’t know my mind/ When you see me laughing, I’m laughing just to keep from crying." What Josh was singing was something quite different: a repertoire of blues about current events, written from a strong left-wing perspective. Some of the other blues artists who became caught up in the folk revival recorded similar pieces (Big Bill Broonzy’s "Black, Brown and White" and Leadbelly’s "Bourgeois Blues" are the most successful examples), but only Josh made it the centerpiece of his work.
In 1941, Josh White was 27 and had already lived out two previous musical careers. He had spent his childhood traveling around the South as "lead boy" for blind blues and gospel singers, making his first recordings at age 14 with the streetcorner evangelist Blind Joe Taggart. Then, in the early 1930s, he had settled in Harlem and became a solo artist, his records influencing a generation of players in the southeastern states (both Blind Boy Fuller and John Jackson covered his songs and guitar arrangements). These early recordings were pretty standard blues and gospel fare, though his guitar work was already outstanding and he was the only artist to have simultaneous success in the sacred and secular markets, recording gospel under his own name and blues as "Pinewood Tom." Only one of his 1930s records hinted at his future direction: in 1936 he put out "No More Ball and Chain" backed with "Silicosis Is Killin’ Me," two songs by a populist country songwriter, Bob Miller. Miller was a link between what was then called "hillbilly" music and the progressive New York scene, working with the Appalachian ballad singer and union organizer Aunt Molly Jackson and later the Almanac Singers, but his collaboration with Josh was brief. They might have done more work together, but, shortly after making the record, Josh cut his right hand so severely that he was unable to play for the next four years.
It was with the Almanacs that he first recorded for Keynote Records, an outgrowth of New Masses magazine, and in 1941 the label released his most influential album of the period, Southern Exposure: An Album of Jim Crow Blues. This time, the songs were all original compositions, collaborations between Josh and the Harlem Renaissance poet Waring Cuney. It was the first full-fledged Civil Rights record album, and there would never be another with so much popularity or impact. The title song gives an idea; written to the tune of "Careless Love," it was the lament of a Southern sharecropper:
Well, I work all the week in the blazin’ sun, (3x)Can’t buy my shoes, Lord, when my payday comes.I ain’t treated no better than a mountian goat, (3x)Boss takes my crop and the poll takes my vote.
The rest of the material, most of it in a straightforward 12-bar blues framework, included "Jim Crow Train," Bad Housing Blues," and "Defense Factory Blues." The latter was typical, a hard-hitting attack on wartime factory segregation with lines like, "I’ll tell you one thing, that bossman ain’t my friend/ If he was, he’d give me some democracy to defend." Harlem’s main newspaper, the Amsterdam News, devoted two articles to the album’s release, rating it as a work that "no record library should be without" and emphasizing the painful familiarity of the subject matter: "All of you know the guy who ëwent to the defense factory trying to find some work to do . . .’; and over there on 133d St. and Park Ave., and down in Mississippi and out in Minnesota, we all have a brother or a sister or a cousin who can wail: ëwoke up this mornin’ rain water in my bed. . . . There ain’t no reason I should live this way. . . I’ve lost my job, can’t even get on the WPA.’”
01 Southern Exposure
02 Uncle Sam Says
03 Jim Crow Train
04 Bad Housing Blues
05 Hard Times Blues
06 Defence Factory Blues
(Thanks to Elijah Wald, Living Blues magazine, for the information.)
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