Archive for the 'Non classé' Category

In 1965, Dylan opened his monumental and controversial set at the Newport Folk Festival with “Maggie’s Farm”, a song from his recent album, “Bringing It All Back Home.” It was the first time he went on stage with an electric band, much to the consternation of the crowd. To learn more about this era and the profound changes Dylan struggled with, click here.

I was the biggest fan of Dylan’s new electric music and “Maggie’s Farm” was, and still is, at the very top of my favourites. However, in 1965, I had no idea that “Maggie’s Farm” would occupy such a special place in my life.

By the end of my adolescence, I had decided that I wanted to be an educated man. I had two friends, André “Red” Henri and Jean-Pierre Béland, who were educated and both of them spoke like a bird sings – extended vocabularies, sure expressions, I could have listened to them speak all day. So, when I finished high school, I took aim at university, looking to get educated. This was not without problems. The university was in Ottawa and I was in Rockland. I had no car, no money and my parents couldn’t afford to pay for my studies. In my mind, my entire life depended on achieving a successful education so I borrowed money from the bank and I rode the bus to Ottawa every morning, coming back home every night.

One of my new classes ended at 11 PM and there was no bus service at that hour. I tried changing the hours of my course but this was 1968-69 and the students had suddenly become ultra-cool hippies – they had occupied the administration building and were protesting against the war, the laws, everything except pot. The university administration communicated with the students by stapling flyers on the telephone poles telling us where we could reach them on a daily basis. The problem was that I never read public notices. I lost sight of the already dreary path of my courses.

In those classes, the professors were disinterested and the curriculum was no more than a race for them – they all wanted to finish as soon as possible. If I asked a question, they politely answered that the question was interesting but that we didn’t have the time to get into that. My illusions totally shattered, I talked to Jean-Pierre in the cafeteria – Jean-Pierre was finishing his last year while I was starting my first. Not for the last time, my friend gave me his support and made me understand that I could educate myself (we read books back then) and perhaps in a better way than in the organized methods of the province. I left university in February 1969, a total failure in my own eyes.

I would be remiss not to mention that both Alrick and Roch, my musical sidekicks, sucessfully completed their university studies. Alrick went to Eastern Washington State College, working summers in construction back home in Cranbrook B.C. to pay for his tuition. Like me, he was lonely, didn’t feel ready and quit after his first semester. Ill suited to the forestry, construction and mining jobs available to uneducatied youths, Alrick went back to school and found his way to the social sciences and a degree in psychology. After three years in Vancouver, Alrick studied journalism at Carleton University and earned his masters degree in 1984, the only one in his immediate family to do so. Roch, who is also from Rockland and who has been a good friend since high school, was in the same predicament as I was. His mother raised him and his sister on her own and the family had no money for tuition. Like me, Roch had to borrow money from the bank and ride a bus to Ottawa and back. Unlike me, Roch persevered for three long years and earned his baccalaureate in Political Science.

I started working in September but teenagers without diplomas don’t get the best jobs. I worked on sorting and delivering mail in a basement room of the Sir John Carling Building, which doesn’t exist anymore but was occupied by the Ministry of Agriculture at that time and was part of Ottawa’s Central Experimental Farm. To get to work, I drove in with Mr. Fernand Laporte and Mr. Ovila Diotte, both from Rockland and both elegant in their suits and ties, me, not so much. Mr. Laporte, also a very educated man, was the best whistler I ever met in my life. Roger Whittaker would have been put to shame. Mr. Laporte was captivated by the classical music we listened to on the radio and he whistled to his heart’s content. It was like travelling with a bird and, with a lot of practice, I also learned to whistle pretty well, thanks to Mr. Laporte.

The work was boring but I had three friends in the mail room. Jim, a very intelligent anglophone a little older than I was, had anticipated the “goth” style by several years. This was a new world to me – we didn’t have goths in Rockland. Jim was tall, wore a long black coat that went to his ankles, black jeans and black t-shirt, black Army boots and even his long hair was dyed black. His favourite group was the Rolling Stones and he lived for the profound negativity of their lyrics, like “Heat of Stone”, “Under My Thumb” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Jim even looked like Jagger!

My second friend, Marcel, was a guy from the streets of Hull, maybe six years older than I was. Nature had not been kind to Marcel – he was skinny and had a hook nose, his hair was short and unruly and he only had a few teeth left, all of them rotten! Marcel was a romantic and spoke to me endlessly of his girlfriend. He quickly saw that I was a naïve country guy and he became in some ways my protector, almost an older brother. Particularly, Marcel hid me from one of the civil servants on the third floor, a very vulgar and predatory homosexual with an affinity for young francophones. Marcel convinced him that I neither spoke nor understood French, which did not prevent him from verbally tormenting me all the more, thinking that I didn’t understand what he said. Seeing this, Marcel took over the delivery of this monster’s mail in my place. A friend like few others, Marcel.

My third friend was called Doug but everybody knew him as Dougie, a tall thirtyish man that people thought was retarded but I just saw him as a simple man, uncomfortable with the complicated interactions that people juggled amongst themselves. He lived with his mother, whom he loved very much. He also had something that none of the other workers had – enthusiasm. Dougie could sort and deliver mail like nobody else. He was good at his job, proud of himself and he was happy, spreading his joy to every floor of the building. Everyone loved Dougie. That is to say, everyone loved Dougie except one person – the mail room manager.

He was an ex-Army type, thick in the torso and thick in the head, always angry, undoubtedly frustrated by his miserable life. He blamed Dougie for everything because Dougie never talked back. Dougie just looked at the floor in shame, never understanding what it was he had done wrong. I started hating my boss more than I hated Hitler and I wanted to hurt him like he hurt Dougie. So I waited for the busiest time of the year, two weeks before Christmas, and I went into his office and told him something unforeseen had happened and I needed to quit immediately, leaving him shorthanded. He was furious, very disappointed in me but I left the mail room with a smile on my face.

Back in Rockland, I felt like a total failure but I was nineteen years old. Nineteen-year-olds don’t stay moody too long. They have support mechanisms, lots of them. In my mind, I started equating the Experimental Farm with “Maggie’s Farm” – that place where East is somewhere West and everything low is on one of those floors higher up. I kept the door to my room shut, banging on my guitar and singing that delicious Dylan diatribe at the top of my lungs – “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more!” It was music as emotional liberation. Hearing those cries and howls emanating from my room, my poor mother, not for the first nor for the last time, surely thought that her son had finally gone mad.
 
Richard Séguin – electric guitars, voice
Alrick Huebener – upright bass
Roch Tassé – drums
 
Maggie’s Farm

In the United States, the 1920s are known as « The Roaring Twenties” but just exactly what was causing people to roar? The end of the first World War? I doubt it. The Americans only participated in the last year of the hostilities. In the 1920s, two things made Americans roar – jazz and booze.

Prohibition in the United States (from 1920 to 1933) banned the manufacture, the transportation, the importation, the exportation and the sale of alcoholic beverages. This led to bootlegging and speakeasies where jazz, illegal alcohol and the latest dance crazes flourished. Prohibition also led to organized crime and gangsters like Al Capone and Dutch Schultz but that’s a story for another day.

Jazz is a totally American institution born in New Orleans in Louisiana. For the most part, jazz artists were Afro-Americans like Jelly Roll Morton (Ferdinand LaMothe), Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Most artists worked in the big urban centres of Chicago and New York but there were exceptions. An exception all his life, Leon Bismark “Bix” Beiderbecke, born in 1903 in Davenport, Iowa, was the youngest of three children of a German immigrant. Beiderbecke senior was a rich merchant in wood and coal often absent from home and very authoritarian when he was there. Consequently, Bix was never able to be close to his father and this lack tortured him all his life.

While still very young, his mother encouraged his interest in the piano and Bix developed an affinity for the music of French composer Claude Debussy. When he was 7, the Davenport newspapers spoke enthusiastically of his remarkable musical ear, playing at the piano any air he heard, in spite of his lack of formal training. Bix gravitated towards jazz when he heard his brother Burnie’s record collection, especially the music of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a racially-integrated group which made the first jazz recording in 1917, “Livery Stable Blues.” This magnificent piece, where the instruments imitate the sound of barnyard animals, caused quite a sensation at the time. Bix also heard the jazz played on the riverboats that went down the Mississippi River to Davenport.

Things didn’t go so well at school. Bix had an aversion for teaching in all its forms. At the time, learning disabilities and poor grades at school were considered a deficiency. Things got worse in 1912 when Bix contracted scarlet fever and had to repeat the previous year. Bix felt humiliated and more and more alienated.

In high school, Bix played with a number of bands on an old, dented cornet, a gift from a neighbour. In addition to his passion for jazz, it was the Prohibition era and Bix started drinking but he couldn’t moderate his consumption. He was more and more absent and his grades plummeted. All men abuse alcohol for the same reason – they’re in an intolerable place and they want to be elsewhere at all costs. Alcohol is readily available, inexpensive and very efficient at taking people elsewhere.

Bix indeed found himself in an intolerable situation in 1921 when two men witnessed him taking a five-year-old girl into a garage. By all accounts, nothing untoward happened but Bix was arrested by the police and accusations were filed. Both families involved and the police decided to erase all records of the incident but Bix’s father was furious, as he often was, and shipped his son off to Lake Forest, a military academy near Chicago. This amounted to giving a Zippo to a pyromaniac. Bix quickly found his way to the Chicago clubs, with the jazz, the booze and the gangsters. He smoked constantly, caught up in a crippling anguish.

While in Chicago with his good friend the composer Hoagy Carmichael, author of such masterpieces as “Stardust” and “Georgia On My Mind”, among others, Bix finally heard one of his idols play in King Oliver’s band – Louis Armstrong, who would become one of the 20th century’s greatest artists. While in New York, Bix also met Nick LaRocca, the cornet player from the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, whose recordings had inspired him to take up the cornet. Bix also played in several bands while at Lake Forest but the only class he managed to pass was music, and even there, he wasn’t interested in learning the formalities of that discipline, he just wanted to play. Bix stopped attending classes and was expelled from Lake Forest in 1922.

Bix next joined a band playing at the Stockton Club in the Cincinnati area. The band was famous for its version of “Wolverine Blues”, a Jelly Roll Morton composition, and became known as the Wolverine Orchestra, the first band made up entirely of white musicians who did not come from New Orleans. On New Year’s Eve, 1923, two gangs crossed paths in a bloody quarrel at the Stockton Club. The police were called in and the Stockton Club had to close its doors. Out of work, Bix played with bands led by Jean Goldkette, Frankie Trumbauer and Paul Whiteman. These associations yielded his best recordings.

The original recordings of Bix Beiderbecke are a treasure, a precious part of my collection, a well whose cool water can be revisited at will. Starting with one of his own compositions, here is “Davenport Blues”, written, of course, for his home town and recorded in 1924 under the name of Bix And His Rhythm Jugglers. The acoustic recording process was still in effect at the time, where the sound of the musicians was amplified by a huge horn which caused a needle to vibrate and etch grooves on a wax disc. This method was replaced in 1925 by yet another new invention, the microphone. The joyful melodies of the piece belie the internal strife of the composer.

Davenport Blues, Bix And His Rhythm Jugglers, 1924

Bix’s performance on “Singin’ The Blues”, a composition by J. Russell Robinson, Con Conrad, Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young recorded in 1927 with the Frankie Trumbauer Orchestra, is certainly one of his most famous. His tone and his imagination are in full bloom. The guitar part is played by the great Eddie Lang, the father of jazz guitar. In 1977, this recording was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Singin’ The Blues, Frankie Trumbauer And His Orchestra, 1927

“In A Mist”, another of Bix’s compositions, is the only piece he published under his own name and the only piano solo he recorded, in 1927. The piece is unique in all of the jazz from this era. Indeed, you have to wait until the arrival of Thelonious Monk, 20 years later, before hearing those dissonant chords and chromatic structures again.

In A Mist, Bix Beiderbecke, 1927

Bix’s style, concise but emotionally charged, made him a celebrity, known even more in Europe than in America. Eddie Condon, a guitarist who played an important part in the development of jazz in New York, said that Bix’s cornet “sounded like a girl saying yes.”

Paul Whiteman’s busy schedule, both in concerts and in recordings, exacerbated Bix’s alcoholism. In 1928, during a tour of Cleveland, he suffered a serious nervous breakdown. He had to return to Davenport to recuperate. A thorough examination at the Keely Institute in Dwight, Illinois, confirmed the terrible consequences of his alcoholism. His liver was swollen and inflammation of the nerves complicated his condition.

1929 came quickly and all musicians found themselves out of work due to the Great Depression. Unfortunately, Bix only lived for music so he lost his only reason to live. On his last recording in New York in 1930, Bix played with his friend Hoagy Carmichael, who sang his new composition, “Georgia On My Mind”, for the first time. In 2014, this recording was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Bix found himself in New York and rented a small apartment in Queens. He closed the door and started to drink endlessly. In the evening of August 6, 1931, hysterical cries emanated from Bix’s apartment and his rental agent came in to witness his uncontrollable trembling. He ranted that two Mexicans with long knives were hiding under the bed. Trying to calm him, the rental agent looked under the bed and was standing back up to reassure Bix that nothing was amiss when Bix stumbled and fell in his arms. A doctor from a nearby apartment was summoned but Bix was already dead.. He was 28 years old. His mother and brother took a train to New York and made arrangements to return his body back home, where he rests in Oakdale cemetery.

Little is known of Bix’s love life. Alcoholic musicians with no control were not in demand with young women looking for a stable relationship. Dorothy Baker’s 1938 novel “Young Man With A Horn”, is loosely based on Bix’s life. The novel was also the basis for the 1950 film of the same name, directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall and Doris Day. A minor planet, the asteroid 23457, is named Beiderbecke in his honor.

The Beiderbecke home is now a Bed and Breakfast for tourists. During the renovations, a pile of 78 rpm records were found in the attic, all addressed to Beiderbecke senior from his son Bix, who sought his father’s approval all his life. The records, some 200 titles, were still in their packages. No one had opened them. No one had listened.

Growing up in a rural environment as part of a large stable family, playing outdoors with lots of friends, I was incredibly happy as a child. I managed to endure, perhaps not all that well, the loss of my grandparents and of my brother Gabriel. However, starting with the Cuban Missile crisis in late 1962, what I failed to endure was the existence of foreign political leaders who threatened the survival of all life on this planet. I started hating people I didn’t know who interfered with my perfect life, as if they were entitled to decide other people’s fate. This wasn’t the life I wanted and for the first time, I was unhappy. Then things got worse.

I had just started high school when Oswald shot Kennedy. Then Ruby shot Oswald and later died of a pulmonary embolism at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, the same place where Kennedy and Oswald died. Then James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King Jr. and Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy, both in 1968. I was (and have been ever since) conscious that I was living next to a nation of barbarians. Any nation whose citizens are legally entitled to bear arms is, by definition, a nation of barbarians. To this day, I thank Providence that they didn’t shoot their harshest critic, a man who lived long enough to actually make a difference – Bob Dylan.

I followed Bob Dylan because he spoke of everything I was anxious about. In 1962, “Blowin’ in the Wind” became an anthem for the Civil Rights Movement. In 1963, racist Byron De La Beckwith assassinated black Civil Rights activist Medgar Evars. Dylan responded by singing “Only a Pawn in Their Game” at the Freedom March on Washington in 1963, where doctor Martin Luther King Jr. pronounced his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Still in 1963, Dylan published the album “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, a dire warning about the escalating arms race. Violence and protest were everywhere in 1964 when he published the album “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, an obvious understatement.

Dylan never actively sought the fame and adulation that surrounded him every waking hour of every day. An entire generation of young, educated people expected him to be the saviour of their troubled existence but Dylan was always an outsider. While the entire music industry, everyone from The Byrds to Mitch Miller, from Harry Belafonte to Duke Ellington, tried to grab a piece of Dylan’s pie by recording hundreds of versions of his songs, Dylan was moving in a different direction, his music gradually acquiring a blues edge intensified by the addition of electric instruments. It started with his 1965 album entitled “Bringing It All Back Home,” where some magnificent acoustic songs were featured next to a few electric songs that revealed a different Dylan, an exceptional lyricist whose consciousness seemed to be exploding.

Dylan returned from an exhausting tour of England (see D.A. Pennebaker’s 1965 documentary “Don’t Look Back”) and went into the studio in June, 1965 to record “Like a Rolling Stone.” The song went through different tempos, multiple pages of lyrics, a trial ¾ time signature and a number of musicians, the two most famous being Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. Bloomfield, the fiery guitarist from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band who Dylan said was the best guitarist he had ever heard, was an easy pick. At that time, Al Kooper was a 21-year-old guitarist invited by producer Tom Wilson to take part in the session. When Kooper heard Bloomfield play, he put his guitar back in its case and moved to the control booth! When Wilson moved a musician from organ to piano, Kooper bluffed Wilson into believing he had a perfect organ part for the song. Wilson scoffed at him but didn’t say no and when Dylan heard Kooper play, he told Wilson to turn up the volume on the organ. Wilson protested that Kooper didn’t know how to play the organ but Dylan got his way and the most famous organ part of the decade was born.

Because of concerns from the sales and marketing departments over the song’s unprecedented six-minute length and “raucous” rock sound, “Like a Rolling Stone” was initially rejected by Columbia Records. A discarded acetate of the song made its way to a New York disco and was quickly worn out completely at the demands of the crowd. On July 20, 1965, “Like a Rolling Stone” was released as a single with the acoustic gem, “Gates of Eden” as its B-side.

According to review aggregator Acclaimed Music, “Like a Rolling Stone” is the statistically most acclaimed song of all time. Rolling Stone magazine listed the song at No. 1 in their “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list. At an auction in 2014, Dylan’s handwritten lyrics to the song fetched $2 million, a world record for a popular music manuscript. In an interview with CBC radio in Montreal, Dylan called the creation of the song a “breakthrough”, explaining that it changed his perception of where he was going in his career.

I was 15 when I first heard “Like a Rolling Stone.” I was walking through the school cafeteria, a radio was playing in the back and when I heard that first snare shot, what Bruce Springsteen said “sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind”, followed by Al Kooper’s sublime organ, I stopped dead in my tracks. I didn’t move for 6 minutes.

Immediately after the release of “Like a Rolling Stone”, Dylan went on a tour that encompassed three continents. He was booed, threatened and assaulted everywhere he played. Why? The band played electric instruments. The dynamics between acoustic and electric performances are opposite. In an acoustic performance, the direction is toward the artist, the audience listens, pays attention and there is a personal bond with the artist. None of that exists in an electric performance. The direction is toward the audience, loud, agressive and imposing. In Dylan’s case, the personal bond with the audience was lost, which was perceived as a betrayal.

At the Newport Folk Festival Pete Seeger threatened to cut the wires to the amplifiers and Dylan was booed off the stage after three songs. He was coaxed back, acoustic guitar in hand, to prophetically sing “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” At Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in New York, fans booed and rushed the stage. This insane period is perfectly captured in Martin Scorsese’s excellent documentary about Dylan in the 1960’s called “No Direction Home”, the title taken from the lyrics to “Like a Rolling Stone.” Dylan is clearly shown as a progressively frustrated and hopeless artist in the face of an insensible public and even more senseless media. He talks of “having enough with the whole scene and quitting for a while.” As it turned out, this decision was made for him. After returning home from the tour and finishing yet another masterpiece recording with “Blonde On Blonde”, Dylan was involved on a serious motorcycle accident on July 29, 1966. The incident is clouded in mystery. No police report was ever filed. Dylan did not go to a hospital. He spent three months in the third-floor bedroom of a local doctor he knew.

Dylan continued writing and recording but his music was never the same. Different but still great – “All Along the Watchtower” from Dylan’s 1967 album “John Wesley Harding” made Jimi Hendrix a household name. However, it took eight years for Dylan to tour again.

Once again, all my thanks go out to Roch and Alrick, two of the best musicians I have been lucky enough to know.

 

Richard Séguin – voice, 6 and 12 string acoustic guitars, electric guitars, MIDI guitar (organ)
Alrick Huebener – upright bass
Roch Tassé – drums

 

Like a Rolling Stone

The welcoming page for my site identifies it as “Yesterday’s music, revisited.” I’ve loved yesterday’s music since I heard Bert Jansch playing 300-year-old Celtic melodies in the 1960s. To me, this was a real time machine – I was able to hear the same thing people were hearing 300 years ago. It felt like I was there.

Today, I am fascinated by the past and specifically the music that was created between the world wars, that period in America where roots music began to flourish, with its simplicity, its spirituality and its antiquity. Roots music is history and there is no greater teacher than history. In a time when more and more people carelessly surrender control of their life to technology, history and its teachings loom even larger in importance. As Edmund Burke said in the 1700’s, “Those who don’t know history, are doomed to repeat it.”

The two decades between the world wars were given catchy names – “The Roaring Twenties” and “The Great Depression.” The 1920s saw scholars and collectors from northern States seek out musicians to record in order to preserve folksongs and styles that they feared would disappear amidst the rapid pace of social, economic, cultural and technological change then engulfing America. At the same time, northern businesses saw the tremendous potential for profit from rising sales in phonographs and records. These businesses organized roots music into categories based on the colour line- race records for black musicians, hillbilly records for white musicians – even though the colour line didn’t exist among musicians. Musicians had to eat and they played what people wanted to hear. A black bluesman might have to play for a country barn dance or a bar mitzva; a white string band might have to make black people dance at a run down roadhouse.

The record companies made the investment so they decided which songs would be recorded, how and where they would be distributed and marketed, and who would share in the profits. There was tremendous growth in the music industry in the late 1920s but, as everything was flourishing, the Great Depression dealt the recording industry a devastating blow, sending phonograph sales plummeting from 987,000 in 1927 to 40,000 in 1932. In the same time, record sales plunged from 104 million to just 6 million. By 1935, the eleven companies that specialized in blues and other roots-based styles had all been driven out of business.

Mississippi John Hurt (1893-1966), like many musicians of this era, was caught in the middle of this “perfect storm.” Through his collaborations with Willie Narmour (1889-1961), a popular white fiddle player, he got a chance to record for Okeh Records in 1928. He recorded 19 songs but only 13 were released. “Sliding Delta” was one of the six other songs that were not released and were lost in history’s dust. Mississippi John’s records came out at the wrong time, didn’t sell well, and he went back to what he always was – a farmer and sharecropper in Avalon, Mississippi. Thirty-five years later, Mississippi John was convinced to play again, this time for northern audiences who welcomed him with open arms. He became a very important figure in the Folk and Blues Revival of the 1960s and he was the musician who influenced me more than any other, convincing me to strive for the higher ground of guitar playing.

“Sliding Delta” is one of many songs that spoke of the devastating floods which continually torment America. It conveys the disturbing image of the ground being carried away by water. The song was saved from obscurity and finally recorded by Mississippi John in the 60s, both in the studio and in live performances. The song was also later recorded by Doc and Merle Watson – Doc was a big fan and friend of Mississippi John’s, often calling him “uncle John.” It is to be noted that a song called “Sliding Delta” was recorded in 1930 by bluesman Tommy Johnson (1896-1956), but it is a different song with different lyrics.

There is no information anywhere concerning the meaning of Mississippi John’s lyric about the “big Kate Allen.” He never mentioned it and no one asked him about it. After some research, I believe it is a reference to a locomotive, always given the feminine gender in the English language. Certainly, there were a lot of Allen locomotives at the time, named after Horatio Allen (1802-1899), the American engineer who designed them. “Kate” is almost certainly a reference to the Katy (K.T.), the name given to the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railway, which Taj Mahal points to in his brilliant composition, “She Caught the Katy, Left Me a Mule to Ride.”

Several blues songs of this era feature a reference to a man’s entire worldly possessions fitting into a suitcase and a trunk. People did not own homes and many worked in servitude. I first heard this reference in 1964 when The Animals had a huge hit with “House of the Rising Sun”, which laments “The only thing a gambler needs is a suitcase and a trunk.” It takes me a whole room in my house just to accommodate my guitars.

Ironically, as Mississippi John was recording “Sliding Delta” in 1928, his home State of Mississippi was recovering from the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The flood broke 145 levees, flooded 27,000 square miles of land to a depth of 30 feet, killed approximately 500 people and left 700,000 homeless. There are indications that “Sliding Delta” was part of Mississippi John’s repertoire as far back as 1907 but many songs were specifically written for the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, including “Mississippi Heavy Water Blues” by Barbecue Bob (Robert Hicks, 1902-1931) in 1927; “Backwater Blues” by Bessie Smith (1894-1937), also in 1927; “When The Levee Breaks” by Memphis Minnie (Lizzie Douglas, 1897-1973) and Kansas Joe McCoy (1905-1950) in 1929; and the very influential “High Water Everywhere” by Charley Patton (1891-1934), also in 1929. The great flood was also the inspiration behind Randy Newman’s majestic 1974 hit, “Louisiana 1927”, featuring these haunting lyrics, delivered in the Cajun dialect :

 

What has happened down here is the wind have changed
Clouds roll in from the north and it start to rain
It rained real hard and it rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

Louisiana’s Evangeline Parish, which I visited in 1999, is in the heart of Cajun country. It takes it’s name from the French word “évangile”, meaning “bible.”

Mississippi John Hurt’s grand-daughter Mary Hurt recalls that “Daddy John”, as she called him, wrote home when he was going to appear on The Tonight Show in 1964. Unfortunately, the family had no TV set. A white neighbour, Miss Annie Cook, invited everyone to come over and watch on her TV. Johnny Carson invited Mississippi John to sing “You Are My Sunshine”. By the end of the song, the audience was in tears of joy, as was Johnny Carson. The audience gave him a standing ovation, unheard of for a TV studio audience.. When Mary’s father saw his own father on TV, he couldn’t believe it. It was a great moment for the whole community of Avalon.

Today, Mississippi John is buried next to his old cabin, which Mary Hurt maintains as a museum. She also runs a summer camp in Avalon where underprivileged urban kids can get out to the country and learn about music.

 

Richard Séguin – voice, acoustic guitar

 

Sliding Delta

When Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, there was a sense that the world was changing and rushing towards the future at a dizzying rate. The commonly called “talking machine” (later known as gramophone, from where we got the name for the Grammy Award), joined the typewriter, the cash register and the sewing machine as the marvels of their age. At the time, Scientific American magazine said of the phonograph, “nothing that can be conceived would be more likely to create the profoundest of sensations, to arouse the liveliest of human emotions, than once more to hear the familiar voices of the dead.”

I’ve been listening to the “familiar voices of the dead” for most of my life, thanks to the work of the record companies who developed methods of electrically recording sound and making their recording equipment portable. In the late 1920s, several northern record companies traveled throughout the Southern United States to record ethnic music of all types and, although most of these recordings have faded into obscurity, they did not fade from memory.

Harry Smith (1923-1991) was an eccentric bohemian and self-taught student of anthropology who developed, among many other preoccupations, a hobby of collecting old records, 78 rpm discs being the only medium at the time. He accumulated a collection of several thousand recordings, and over time began to develop an interest in seeing them preserved. In 1950, he brought the best of his record collection to Moe Asch, the president of Folkways Records with the idea of selling it. Instead, Asch proposed that Smith use the material to edit a multi-volume anthology of folk music in long playing format – then a newly developed, cutting edge medium – and he provided space and equipment in his office for Smith to work in. The resulting three LP records (now six CDs) issued in 1952 contained 84 songs and were issued as The Anthology of American Folk Music. It became the Bible for the folk and blues revival of the 1960s.
The songs in the Anthology were all recorded between 1926 and 1933. All the artists were unknown when the recordings were made but some of them achieved celebrity in later years. Today I focus on one such artist, the singer/guitarist/songwriter Furry Lewis.

Walter E. “Furry” Lewis (1893 – 1981) was born in Greenwood, Mississippi. His family moved to Memphis when he was seven, where he acquired the nickname “Furry” from childhood playmates. By 1908, he was playing at parties, in taverns, and on the street. He was also invited to play several dates with W.C. Handy`s Orchestra – Handy later became one of the most influential of all American songwriters. In his travels as a musician, Lewis was exposed to a wide variety of performers, including Bessie Smith and Blind Lemon Jefferson, which diversified his impressive portfolio. Lewis began to travel around the South, often with itinerant “medicine shows” that included him in vaudeville acts.

In 1917, while trying to hop onto a moving train, his leg got caught in a coupling and he fell underneath the wheels of the train. The accident nearly killed him and led to the amputation of his left leg. Forced to wear a prosthesis for the rest of his life, he grew tired of traveling and took a permanent job in 1922, as a street sweeper for the city of Memphis, a job he held until his retirement in 1966. However, Lewis loved music and kept playing locally. Lewis recorded for Victor Records in 1928, mostly blues tracks, including two railroad songs, “Casey Jones” (sometimes spelled “Kassie Jones”) and “John Henry.” Lewis learned these songs from a Memphis street guitarist simply known as Blind Joe.
Like many bluesmen of his era, Furry Lewis enjoyed renewed interest in his music during the 60s folk and blues revival. He made many new recordings and opened twice for the Rolling Stones, performed on The Tonight Show hosted by Johnny Carson, had a part in a Burt Reynolds movie called “W.W. And the Dixie Dancekings” (1975) and was even profiled in Playboy magazine. In 1973 he was named an Honorary Colonel of the State of Tennessee, an honor also bestowed upon such greats as Duke Ellington and Elvis Presley. In 1976, Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded a song for Furry Lewis called “Furry Sings the Blues.” Lewis began to lose his eyesight because of cataracts in his final years. He contracted pneumonia in 1981, which led to his death from heart failure in Memphis at the age of 88.

Lewis’ song “Casey Jones” is interesting for its unusual two-beat wedge that separates the two parts of each verse. However, it is Lewis’ syncopated and rhythmic vocal delivery that can heard in so many R & B, rock ‘n roll and even rap recordings thereafter.
Jonathan Luther “Casey” Jones (1863 – 1900) from Jackson, Tennessee, was an American railroader for the Illinois Central Railroad. He was killed on April 30, 1900, when his train came around a sharp curve in the tracks and collided with a stalled freight train near Vaughn, Mississippi. By greatly reducing the speed of his train, he is credited with saving the lives of all passengers involved. Casey Jones was the only casualty of the accident and his legend grew from then on.

Some explanations on the lyrics :
– “Drivers”, also called “driving wheels” are those wheels under the train engine which are connected by a rod driven by the pistons of the locomotive. These are the wheels that drive the train, all other wheels are for support.
– “Eastman”, almost certainly, refers to the Eastman street gang which dominated organized crime in the New York borough of Five Points in Manhattan towards the end of the 19th century. A good indication is that the protagonist of the song sells gin and doesn’t have to work! The street gang era of New York is well depicted in Martin Scorsese`s 2002 film, “Gangs of New York.”

 

Richard Séguin – voice, acoustic guitar, percussion (cardboard box)

 

Casey Jones

Born in Laurens, South Carolina, Gary Davis (1896-1972) was one of eight children his mother bore but the only one who survived to adulthood. He became blind as an infant and was mistreated by his mother, so much so that his father placed him in the care of his paternal grandmother.

Davis took to the guitar at an early age and developed a unique style, playing not only ragtime and blues tunes, but also traditional and original songs. In the mid-1920s, he migrated to Durham North Carolina, a major center for black culture at the time. While there, Davis collaborated with a number of other artists in the Piedmont blues scene including Blind Boy Fuller and Bull City Red. The Piedmont (literally, foothill) guitar style was named after the Piedmont plateau region, on the East Coast of the United States from Virginia to Georgia.

It was also during his time in Durham that Davis converted to Christianity and he would later be ordained as a Baptist minister. Following his conversion and especially his ordination, Davis began to express a preference for inspirational gospel music. His strong religious convictions not only helped him deal with his blindness, but also cemented deep gospel roots he would draw on for the rest of his career. He also broke his right wrist in an accident around this time and the wrist was never set properly, which accounts for a good deal of his unorthodox fingering and hand positions on the guitar.

He became a well known street performer in the early 30’s and built up a great reputation at parties and dances around South Carolina, playing his vast repertoire of John Philip Sousa marches, Scott Joplin ragtime piano pieces on the guitar, as well as blues and gospel songs. In 1935, a store manager with a reputation for supporting local artists introduced many artists, including Davis, to the American Record Company. The subsequent recording sessions marked the real beginning of Davis’ career.

In 1940, he moved to New York where he continued to work as a street performer until he recorded again in 1956. These recordings garnered him a lot of attention and he was finally rediscovered the by folk and blues revivalists of the early 60s. He continued recording albums and became very popular on the folk circuit and toured throughout the US and even Europe, spreading his gospel message and spellbinding audiences with his powerful intense voice and his guitar virtuosity.

In New York, guitarists started to frequent his apartment for lessons, including Dave Van Ronk, Stefan Grossman, Bob Weir (later of The Grateful Dead) and Jorma Kaukonen (later of Jefferson Airplane). Like many of the older blues players rediscovered at this time, he performed at the Newport Folk Festival. Peter, Paul and Mary recorded his version of “Samson and Delilah”, also known as “If I Had My Way”, a song by Blind Willie Johnson that Davis had popularized. “Samson and Delilah” was also covered and credited to Davis by the Grateful Dead, who also covered one of Davis’ great masterpieces, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy.” Eric Von Schmidt credited Davis with three-quarters of Schmidt’s “Baby Let Me Follow You Down”, covered by Bob Dylan on his debut album.

I was very fortunate to come of age when the folk revival took North America by storm. I loved everything about the music. Although I started to play guitar in 1963, I had to wait until 1969 before I could buy my first acoustic guitar. For the next six years, I tried to learn the instrument but everything was difficult back then. Even tuning the guitar was a problem – the only tuning aid at that time was a tuning fork and they certainly didn’t sell those in Rockland! At any rate, the tuning fork only helped you tune one string. Now, we have inexpensive digital tuners that precisely tune all the strings of any instrument to perfect concert pitch.

I remember being frustrated at trying to learn to play from recordings – since my guitar was only tuned “by ear” I struggled finding the right pitch and the notes played by the great artists of the time flew at me from everywhere. Then there were innovative guitarists like Bert Jansch who played the guitar in exotic tunings and I couldn’t find their notes on my guitar! I was saved when I saw an ad at the back of a comic book, telling me to write in to the Stefan Grossman Guitar Workshop in New York City for a free catalog of guitar instruction lessons. I started collecting Grossman’s instruction books, everything written out in tablature, a pictorial representation of the six guitar strings complete with numbers on the string lines to indicate at which fret to play each string. For a kid like me, who could never afford real music lessons, tablature was a godsend. Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop, and Stephan Grossman himself, is responsible for nurturing the aspirations of countless guitarists who wanted to learn the fingerpicking style of guitar. The Workshop is still active and now features many priceless video recordings of the great masters from the past. I am still a client.

The Reverend Gary Davis learned “Candyman” around 1905 but he seldom sang the lyrics, judging them to be sacrilegious. I myself never stoop so low as to sing the “Big Leg Ida” verse. Bass lines in fingerpicking are played by the thumb and invariably from low tonic to higher fifth or the higher octave of the tonic. Davis played “Candyman” from high fifth to the low tonic, probably just to confound his students! It is a subtle inversion that is easily fumbled, so that most guitarists play the song the more conventional way. Out of respect (and preference), I play “Candyman” the Reverend’s way.

A number of people today are uncomfortable with the song’s overt reference to a drug pusher (candyman) but the song comes from a time when drugs were not regulated. At the turn of the century, opium was readily available in a liquid form called laudanum and was widely prescribed for everything from menstrual cramps to hysteria and depression. Cocaine in various forms was found at most high society gatherings and was the drug of choice for Sigmund Freud and Pope Leo XIII, among many others. It is never wise to view a bygone era with contemporary sensibilities.

One of the first records I bought was a collection of Reverend Gary Davis tunes, including “Cincinnati Flow Rag.” The reverend recorded this piece about a dozen times , but never the same way twice.. That record I had is long gone and I haven’t come across that particular version of “Cincinnati Flow Rag” but it was unforgettable, complete with field hollers. I play it as I remember it.

For this recording I used my Godin Seagull guitar, hand-made in La Patrie, Québec.

 

Richard Séguin – voice and acoustic guitar

 

Candyman + Cincinnati Flow Rag

Jimmie Rodgers (1897 – 1933) was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and was a restless rebel from the start. By the age of 13, he had demonstrated a marked affinity for entertainment, twice organizing traveling shows, and twice brought back home by his father. A foreman for the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, his father soon had Jimmie working as a water boy for the railroad, a position that allowed him to be exposed to the work songs of African-American workers who laid and maintained the tracks. He also learned to play the guitar from the hobos who rode the freight trains across America. Rodgers eventually worked as a brakeman and was later known as “The Singing Brakeman”, showing up for shows in full railroad overalls and brakeman’s cap.

In 1924, Rodgers was diagnosed with tuberculosis, an incurable disease at the time. The doctors prescribed rest but, even though the disease ended his railroad career, Rodgers was restless and he got back into the entertainment industry, organizing traveling shows that played throughout the Southeastern United States. Then, in 1927, a miracle happened.

The Victor Talking Machine Company (later RCA Victor) developed a portable recording machine (it weighed more than 300 pounds!) and went down to Bristol Tennessee in 1927 to record the music of everyday Americans. The Southern United States was poor, rural but rich in tradition, compared to the North which was urban and industrial. The recordings, known as the Bristol Sessions, yielded music from very diverse cultures – Cajun, Mexican, Hawaiian, Appalachian, Native American and Blues, music which existed without the knowledge of the rest of the country.

The two huge stars to come out of the Bristol Sessions were The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. They were unique in their own way – Rodgers was a born entertainer who lived for his fans while the Carter Family played songs that endure to this day. The Carter Family also endeared themselves to their public by being like everybody else – for example, in the middle of the Great Depression, they charged 15 cents for their concerts but widows and orphans always got in free.

Although commercial recordings of American music began in 1922, it was almost impossible to generate any revenue from record sales because radio had become virtually universal. Certainly, the economy and the Great Depression ended many prospects at a career in the music business. Nevertheless, Rodgers’ 1927 recordings were very successful, yielding two songs for which he was paid $100, a lot of money in those days. From this small step forward, Rodgers built a career that captured the hearts of America. He was the first American artist to rise to prominence through his recordings. His concert performances were equally popular and featured a mix of musical influences, from the blues he had heard from railroad workers, to yodeling, which he had first heard from a troupe of Swiss entertainers. His yodeling became so popular that Rodgers wrote 13 numbered “blue yodels”, the most famous being “Blue Yodel No 1” (T for Texas), “Blue Yodel No 8 (Mule Skinner Blues) and “Blue Yodel No 9 (Standin’ on the Corner) which was recorded in 1930 with Louis Armstrong on trumpet and Armstrong’s wife Lil on piano. Pretty soon, people had also nicknamed Rodgers “The Blue Yodeler.” His blue yodels were later recorded by the likes of Bob Wills, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Bill Munroe, Waylon Jennings and Jerry Garcia.

Rodgers’ next-to-last recordings in 1932 were made in Camden Studios, New Jersey, from where I chose his mournful ballad, “Miss the Mississippi and You.” By this time, tuberculosis clearly was getting the better of him. It was not in Rodgers’ make-up to stay still, though, and his constant touring and recording schedule only hurt his chances of recovery. During this final recording session in New York City, he was so weakened from years of fighting his ailment that he had a nurse accompanying him. Rodgers was coughing up blood and needed to rest on a cot between songs. Jimmie Rodgers died in 1933, two days after his last recording, leaving a wife and a young daughter in mourning. Another of his daughters, June, died in 1923 at the age of 6 months. Jimmie Rodgers was 35 years old at the time of his death and he accounted for fully 10% of RCA Victor’s record sales, in a market drastically reduced by the Great Depression.

 

Richard Séguin – voice, acoustic guitar, mandolin

 

Miss The Mississippi And You

Mississippi John Hurt (1893-1966) was born in Teoc but raised in Avalon Mississippi, where he spent almost all of his life, working as a farmhand and sharecropper. He began playing guitar at the age of nine, playing for parties and dances on borrowed guitars (like me!). He refused an invitation to join a travelling medicine show because he never wanted to leave Avalon. Through his association with fiddler Willie Narmour, he was first recorded in Memphis in 1928 by Okeh records but it was the time of the Great Depression – the recordings didn’t sell and Okeh went out of business shortly afterwards.

Mississippi John returned to Avalon and obscurity, living his “ordinary” life. However, his 1928 recordings were reissued in 1952, generating interest in locating him. Musicologist Dick Spottwood finally found Hurt’s cabin in 1963, convincing him to perform again. Mississippi John wasn’t comfortable with the idea but he appeared at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, to widespread acclaim. He subsequently performed extensively at colleges, concert halls, and coffeehouses and even appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. When he died in 1966, Mississippi John Hurt had influenced countless guitar players from several different musical genres. A soft-spoken man, his nature was reflected in his music, making him one of the most beloved figures of the folk music revival of the 1960s.

I first saw and heard Mississippi John Hurt on CBC television reruns of Rainbow Quest, an American black and white TV show hosted by Pete Seeger and featuring unrehearsed performances by the very best artists in folk music, old-time music, bluegrass and blues. That moment literally changed my life. Living in a small rural community of Eastern Ontario and trying to teach myself how to play guitar, I had never heard anyone play and sing as well as John Hurt. His finger-picking style, which was so natural to him and so alien to me, completely captivated me. He had taken on for me the figure of a grand-father, certainly the most important musical influence of my life. I spent the rest of my life trying to play like Mississippi John.

I started working when I was 19 and, after 6 years of borrowed guitars, I could finally afford to buy my first acoustic guitar, a Gibson J-45 which now belongs to Roch Tassé. At the time, I remember that I had “green light” songs and “red light” songs as far as difficulty and “Spike Driver’s Blues” was at the very top of the “red light” songs.

To hear me play Roch’s Gibson J-45, click here.

“Spike Driver’s Blues” is about John Henry, an African-American folk hero who worked as a “steel driver” – a man tasked with hammering a steel drill into rock to make holes for explosives to blast the rock in the construction of a railroad tunnel. According to legend, John Henry’s prowess as a steel driver was measured in a race against a steam-powered rock drilling machine. John Henry won the race only to die in victory with hammer in hand as his heart gave out. Various locations have been suggested as the site of the contest, including Big Bend Tunnel in West Virginia, Lewis Tunnel in Virginia, and Coosa Mountain Tunnel in Alabama.

The story of John Henry has often been told in a classic folk song, which exists in many versions, and has been the subject of numerous stories, plays, books, and novels. Mississippi John Hurt’s version of “Spike Driver”s Blues” came out of the penal institutions and chain gangs, with the lyrics coming from several sources.

 

Richard Séguin – voice, acoustic guitar
The percussion is taken from samples and original recordings by Roch Tassé

 

Spike Driver’s Blues

The first thing anyone should know about Lyle Lovett is that he’s from Texas. People from Texas are different from other people. Lovett even wrote a song about that, called “That’s Right, You’re Not From Texas.”

Many of country music’s greatest stars, like Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings could not bear the conventions and typecasting of Nashville and moved to Texas and California where their songs became known as “Outlaw” country music. Lyle Lovett fits this mold perfectly.

Lovett was born in Houston, Texas, in 1957 and started writing songs after attending Texas A & M University in the late 70s. He continued writing and performing while studying abroad in Germany. Returning to the U.S., he played in several clubs around Texas and in 1984, a demo tape of his songs found its way to MCA Records, who immediately signed him, releasing his first album in 1986 to universal critical acclaim. Lovett has since released more than a dozen albums and acted in a number of films, including five films directed by the late great Robert Altman. While typically associated with the country genre, Lovett’s compositions often incorporate folk, swing, blues, jazz, gospel and big band music. He has won four Grammy Awards.

His composition “If I Had a Boat” is best introduced by a quote from the Bible, Corinthians 13:11:

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

“If I Had a Boat” is a song written from a child’s perspective and describes an insular world of heros (Roy Rogers), adventure (The Lone Ranger and Tonto), imagination (being lightning fast) and fantasy (owning a pony and a boat), all in the carefree and humourous language of a child. The composition is also disturbingly dark because the adult listener senses that, lurking in the shadows of the child’s perfect world is time, the killer of childhood. In the boy’s mind, he longs to evade this dreaded coming of age by leaving for the ocean with his pony on his boat (neither of which he has). A beautiful and poignant song in Lovett’s long repertoire of impressive compositions.

Richard Séguin – voice, acoustic guitar, mandolin, electric guitar, electric bass

If I Had a Boat

Eddie James “Son” House, Jr. (1902 – 1988) was, at different times of his life, a Baptist deacon and a Delta blues singer. This meeting of the sacred and the profane, the secular and the spiritual, made Son House a fevered and intense guitar player with a voice both powerful and unrestrained.

When he was in his early teens, Son House’s family left Mississippi and moved to Algiers in New Orleans. Recalling these years, he would speak of his hatred of blues music and his passion for the Church. At fifteen he began preaching sermons and was accepted as a paid pastor, first in the Baptist Church and then in the Colored Methodist and Episcopal Church. However, he fell into habits which conflicted with his calling – drinking (like his father) and womanizing. This led him, after so many years of hostility towards secular music, to leave the church and turn to the blues at the age of 25. He quickly developed a unique style by applying the rhythmic drive, vocal power and emotional intensity of preaching to his blues vocabulary.

In 1928, Son House was playing in a juke joint when a man went on a shooting spree, wounding House in the leg. House shot the man dead in self defense but was convicted of manslaughter and received a 15-year sentence at the Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchman Farm), of which he served two years. Upon his release, bluesman Charley Patton invited him to share engagements and to accompany him to a 1930 recording session for Paramount Records. Issued at the start of the Great Depression, the records did not sell and House remained unknown at the national level. However, he was very popular locally and, together with Patton’s associate, Willie Brown, he became a leading regional performer and a formative influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. In 1941 and 1942, he was recorded by the great American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. The following year, he left the Mississippi Delta for Rochester, New York and gave up music.

In 1964, House was “rediscovered” in Rochester and was completely unaware of the 1960s folk and blues revival and the international enthusiasm for his early recordings. He subsequently toured extensively in the United States and Europe and started recording again. Like Mississippi John Hurt, he was welcomed with open arms into the music scene of the 1960s and played at the prestigious Newport Folk Festival in 1964, the New York Folk Festival in 1965 and the 1967 European Tour of the American Folk Festival, along with some of the very best bluesmen like Skip James and Bukka White.

Ill health plagued House in his later years, and in 1974 he retired once again. He later moved to Detroit, Michigan, where he remained until his death from cancer of the larynx in 1988. He was buried at the Mt. Hazel Cemetery and members of the Detroit Blues Society raised enough money through benefit concerts to put a monument on his grave.

When I first saw Son House play “Death Letter” on one of those folk revival TV shows of the late 60s, it marked me for life. There, the secular and the spiritual collided and sparked off one of the most impelling performances in the history of the blues. House plays his resonator guitar with a piece of copper tubing for a slide, his right hand circling and pounding the strings. His voice is that of a preacher in his pulpit. His performance is, for me, proof of the existence of God and, probably, of the Devil as well. Here is the link to see this video :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdgrQoZHnNY

Quite apart from this magnificent performance are the lyrics. At a time when pop music was all flowers and sunshine, Son House spoke of death, of a corpse on a cooling board during the preparation for burial, of the viewing of the corpse, of the graveyard taken over by crowds of people and of the slow descent of the coffin in the grave. It was my fate to know these things at an early age and my performance of “Death Letter” here is certainly psychotherapeutic.

“Death letters” are a service offered by the postal administrations of most countries to help the grieving family communicate the death of a loved one to the public. Typically, the letters are pre-printed with the appropriate sentiments and bordered in black, as are the envelopes used.

I am extremely fortunate to count on the musical support of Alrick Huebener and Roch Tassé, two of the finest musicians in the Ottawa Valley.

 

Richard Séguin – voice, electric guitars
Alrick Huebener – upright bass
Roch Tassé – drums

 

Death Letter