Released in 1987, “Luka “ is a song written by American singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega. It remains her highest-charting song in the world. “Luka” was nominated at the 1988 Grammy Awards for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Female Vocal Performance.

“Luka” deals with the issue of child abuse, a subject that no-one talked about at that time. The song specifically deals with the emotional and physical abuse Vega had herself suffered at the hands of her stepfather. In early live performances of the song, Vega was aware that the subject made people uncomfortable and it was only through the efforts of her manager that the song was ever recorded at all. Historically, it is one of the bravest and most important contributions ever made towards social awareness and responsibility.

At least 1 in 7 children have experienced abuse or neglect in the past year in the United States. This is likely an underestimate since many cases remain unreported. In 2020, 1,750 children died of abuse and neglect in the United States. The rates of child abuse and neglect are 5 times higher for children in families of low social and economic status. In the United States, the total lifetime economic burden associated with child abuse was about $592 billion in 2018. This rivals the cost of other high-profile public health problems, such as heart disease and diabetes. In Canada, over half of Canadians have reported experiencing non-physical maltreatment or both physical and non-physical maltreatment before the age of 15.

Children are innocent and vulnerable and have the right to grow up free from abuse. Everyone has a duty to ensure that this happens. In Canada, reporting child abuse is mandatory under the child welfare statute of each province and territory. Although the reporting rate is growing, many studies show that the actual rates of child abuse may be much higher than those reported – the victims are children and they may lack the understanding or ability to report occurences for themselves. In addition, many children are under the care of their abusers.

The advent of the internet has also created greater instances for the abuse and exploitation of children and young people. Prior to the internet, law enforcement was winning the war against juvenile pornography but the internet has made it a multibillion-dollar industry. Without greater law enforcement, parental vigilance and more severe penalties, there is little hope that the situation will improve.

I’m very fortunate to have two good friends helping me out with some of these recordings. I’ve known Alrick for 7 years and we are birds of a feather. I’ve dreamt of hearing the majesty and magnificent tone of an upright bass on my recordings for 50 years and Alrick’s playing has been an inspiration to me. I’ve known Roch since we were teenagers, we formed our first band when we were 15 and Roch also played percussion on my very first recordings in the 1970s.

Richard Séguin – voice, acoustic and electrick guitars
Alrick Huebener – upright bass
Roch Tassé – drums

To hear the song, click on the title below.

Luka

Copyright Disclaimer under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976 : allowance is made for « fair use » for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research.

“Little Red Rooster” is a blues standard credited to arranger and songwriter Willie Dixon (1915-1992). The song was recorded in 1961 for Chess Records by American bluesman Howlin’ Wolf (Chester Burnett, 1910-1976) but the song is rooted in the Delta blues tradition and appears in earlier recordings by artists like Charley Patton (1891?-1934) and Memphis Minnie (Lizzie Douglas, 1897-1973).

The image of a wayward rooster appears in a number of blues songs from the 1920s and 1930s, with two particular songs identified as precursors to Wolf’s recording. Influential Delta blues musician Charley Patton’s 1929 recording of “Banty Rooster Blues” contains lyrics that are similar to those in Willie Dixon’s composition. Patton was also a noted influence on Howlin’ Wolf in his early days. Similar lyrics are also found in Memphis Minnie’s 1936 acoustic blues recording of “If You See My Rooster (Please Run Him Home).”

The Rolling Stones recorded a modern electric version of “Little Red Rooster” in 1964. The Stones frequently performed it on television and in concert, and released several live recordings of the song. “Little Red Rooster” continues to be performed and recorded, making it one of Willie Dixon’s best-known compositions.

In 1971, Chess arranged for Howlin’ Wolf to record “Little Red Rooster” and other songs with British artists Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts. The recordings were released as “The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions.” Initially, Marshall Chess did not want to pay the expense for flights and accommodations to send Wolf’s long-serving guitarist Hubert Sumlin to England but, much to his credit, an intervention and ultimatum by Eric Clapton righted that wrong.

Howlin’ Wolf’s original “Little Red Rooster” is included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame list of the “500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.”

Richard Séguin – voice, resonator guitar, dobro, electric bass, MIDI programming (drums)

To hear the song, click on the title below.

Little Red Rooster

Copyright Disclaimer under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976 : allowance is made for « fair use » for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research.

Willie Dixon (1915-1992) was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi and he was born to a life in music. He sang in the Baptist Church from the age of four. As a teenager, he sang in a gospel quintet called The Union Jubilee Singers. His playful mother often rhymed things she said, a habit which young Willie soon imitated. Ever the businessman, he started adapting his rhymes into songs that he sold to local musicians.

Dixon moved to Chicago in 1936 and, thanks to his 6’6”, 250 lb frame, became the Illinois State Heavyweight Boxing Champion (Novice Division). He was even Joe Louis’ sparring partner for a while! Dixon played and sang in various Chicago groups, perfecting his technique on the upright bass, until the advent of World War II. He refused conscription into military service as a conscientious objector, saying he would not fight for a nation in which institutionalized racism and racist laws were prevalent. Dixon was jailed 10 months for these beliefs.

Dixon signed with Chess Records as a recording artist but he performed less as he got more involved with administrative tasks for the label. By 1951, he was a full-time employee at Chess, where he acted as producer, talent scout, session musician, and staff songwriter. He was also a producer for Checker Records, a subsidiary of Chess. From late 1956 to 1959, he worked in a similar capacity for Cobra Records, producing early singles by Otis Rush, Magic Sam and Buddy Guy. He later recorded for Bluesville Records and ran his own record label, Yambo Records, and its two subsidiaries, Supreme and Spoonful.

Dixon is considered one of the key figures in the creation of the Chicago blues idiom. He helped far too many artists with way too many great compositions to list here, songs that have lifted these artists to the highest echelons of the blues. Some of the biggest stars of the blues supplemented their careers with songs written by Dixon – Howlin’ Wolf’s “Spoonful”, “Evil”, “Back Door Man”, and “Little Red Rooster” were all Willie Dixon compositions. “Hoochie Coochie Man” and the two songs in this post, “The Same Thing” and “I Am The Blues”, were all recorded by Muddy Waters but all were written by Willie Dixon.

In 1977, unhappy with the small royalties paid by Arc Music, Chess’ publishing company, Dixon and Muddy Waters sued Arc and, with the proceeds from the generous out-of-court settlement, founded their own publishing company, Hoochie Coochie Music. In 1987, Dixon reached an out-of-court settlement with the rock band Led Zeppelin after suing for plagiarism in the band’s use of his music in “Bring It On Home” and lyrics from his composition “You Need Love”, used in the band’s recording of “Whole Lotta Love.”

In his later years, Dixon became a tireless ambassador for the blues and a vocal advocate for its practitioners, founding the Blues Heaven Foundation, which works to preserve the legacy of the blues and to secure copyrights and royalties for blues musicians who were exploited in the past. Willie Dixon won a Grammy Award (1989) and was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame (1980), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1994) and the Songwriters Hall Of Fame (2015).

Richard Séguin – voice, dobro, MIDI programming (piano, upright bass, drums)

To hear the song, click on the link below.

The Same Thing – I Am The Blues

Copyright Disclaimer under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976 : allowance is made for « fair use » for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research.

Henry St. Claire Fredericks Jr. (b.1942) is universally known by his stage name of Taj Mahal. He is an American blues musician who plays guitar, piano, banjo, harmonica, and many other instruments, often incorporating elements of world music into his work. Mahal has reshaped the definition and scope of blues music over the course of his more than 50-year career by fusing it with nontraditional forms, including sounds from the Caribbean, Africa, India, Hawaii, and the South Pacific.

Mahal’s career started in 1964 with the formation of the group Rising Sons, which featured Ry Cooder, one of the best guitarists of the period. Taj next joined up with Jesse Ed Davis, a Kiowa native from Oklahoma and a tremendous guitarist in his own right. With the addition of Gary Gilmore (bass) and Chuck Blackwell (drums), the group performed under Taj Mahal’s name and was one of the first interracial bands of the period.

This is the group I saw in 1968 at Le Hibou coffee house on Sussex Drive in Ottawa. It was one of the best performances I have seen in my life. They tore the roof off the place. Jesse Ed Davis went on to play with the likes of Eric Clapton, John Lennon, George Harrison and Bob Dylan, to name but a few.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of Taj Mahal’s eponymous first album (1968), which took traditional material by Blind Willie McTell (1898-1959), Sonny Boy Williamson (date of birth unknown – 1965), Robert Johson (1911-1938) and Sleepy John Estes (1899-1977), turning everything on its head with some of the most raucous and satisfying electric blues recordings ever made. In less than 24 months, Taj Mahal issued three more albums – Natch’l Blues (1968), the electric Giant Step and the decidedly rural De Ole Folks at Home (1969)

The genesis of my arrangement for “Light Rain Blues” follows the revival of folk music in the U.S. and of folk and Celtic music in Britain in the mid-20th century. It was at this time that I was teaching myself to play the guitar. The most prominent British guitarists involved in this revival were Davey Graham (1940-2008), Bert Jansch (1943-2011), John Renbourn (1944-2015) and Martin Carthy (b. 1941).

When American singer Bob Dylan arrived in London for the first time in 1962 he visited Martin Carthy and heard him perform in public. Dylan learned the traditional song “Scarborough Fair” from Carthy, which he later developed into his own song “Girl From the North Country”.

At this time, many British guitarists experimented with different ways of tuning the guitar, creating “alternate tunings” by voluntarily detuning the strings to obtain tones not otherwise available. Martin Carthy, for example, created the alternate tuning EADEAE to better reach the tonalities of bagpipe music. Carthy called it his “pipe tuning”. About 15 years ago, I was trying out Carthy’s tuning and found an interesting melody which I recorded so as not to forget it. While recently rumaging through old recordings to inspire new projects, I came across that old file, entitled “EADEAE”. It consisted of 25 seconds of an interesting guitar melody, circular, repetitive and sedate, like a long rainy day, played in Carthy’s “pipe tuning”. That melody forms the basis of my arrangement of “Light Rain Blues”.

Richard Séguin – voice, acoustic guitar, mandolin, samples

To hear the song, click on the link below.

Light Rain Blues

Copyright Disclaimer under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976 : allowance is made for « fair use » for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research.

Sometime between the 16th and 19th century, the English ballad “The Three Ravens” evolved into the Scottish ballad “Twa Corbies” (Two Ravens). “The Three Ravens” was first printed in a song book compiled by Thomas Ravenscroft in 1611 but it is perhaps much older than that. Written in the Scots language, the ballad “Twa Corbies” first appeared in correspondence dated 1802, which indicates that it came from the recitation of an old woman at Alva, a small town in Clackmannanshire in the Central Lowlands of Scotland.

“Twa Corbies” is invariably sung in the Scots parlance of the time. The use of an “a” in many words would later be replaced by an “o” : “twa” became “two”, “alane” became “alone” and so on. The word “corbies” obviously comes from the French “corbeaux” (ravens). Here is a modern English translation of the lyrics to “Twa Corbies” :

As I was walking all alone / I heard two ravens making noise
And one unto the other said / Where shall we go and dine today?
Where shall we go and dine today?

In behind that old sod wall / I know there lies a newly slain knight
And nobody knows that he lies there / But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair
His hawk and his hound and his lady fair

His hawk is gone to join the hunt / His hound to fetch a wildfowl home
His lady has taken another mate / So we may make our dinner sweet
So we may make our dinner sweet

You’ll sit on his white neckbone / And I’ll peck out his pretty blue eyes
With many a lock of his golden hair / We’ll line our nest when it grows bare
We’ll line our nest when it grows bare

Many a one for him do mourn / But none will know where he is gone
Over his white bones when they are bare / The wind shall blow for ever more
The wind shall blow for ever more

The ballad is brutally harsh and macabre and reflects its time very well. Violence was considered a necessary part of life in the Middle Ages and people were surrounded by violence in many forms, including wars, bloody tournaments, and deadly rivalries for power and land. Graphic depictions of violent events were also common. Violence played a major role in family disputes, in the justice system, and even in education and entertainment. Nations clashed over land, vassals revolted against lords, and crusaders waged holy wars in the name of religion. Medieval politicians often pointed to warlike behavior in biblical and ancient history to justify their own violent schemes. Men were indeed barbarians, descendant from a long line of barbarians.

The knight in Medieval Times was granted a position of honour, especially in a military capacity. Knights were expert horsemen skilled in battle and enjoyed all the latest technological advantages such as armour, maille, lances and crossbows. And yet, the knight was surpassed in the mid-15th century by advancements in the weapons of war, such as the introduction of the culverin as an anti-personnel, gunpowder-fired cannon. Thus, in “Twa Corbies”, two scavenger ravens searching for their next meal come upon a dead knight fallen behind a wall. The knight has been totally abandoned, his hawk gone to join a hunt, his hound fetching a wildfowl home and his lady already taken with another mate. Seeing no opposition, the ravens descend upon the knight’s carcass, pecking out his eyes and pulling out his hair to thicken their nest. The knight’s sun-bleached bones lie forgotten, the wind blowing over them for ever more.

Richard Séguin – voice, MIDI instruments (dulcimer, fiddle, viola, drums), audio samples

To hear the song, click on the title below

Twa Corbies

Copyright Disclaimer under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976 : allowance is made for « fair use » for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research.

“Death Don’t Have No Mercy” is a song by the American gospel and blues singer-guitarist Reverend Gary Davis (1896-1972). It was first recorded in 1960 during a career rebirth for Davis, thanks to the American folk music revival of that period.

Gary Davis was born in Laurens County in the Piedmont region of South Carolina. Of the eight children his mother bore, he was one of only two who survived to adulthood. He became blind as an infant after improper treatment of an eye condition. He recalled being poorly treated by his mother and that his father placed him in the care of his paternal grandmother. His father left during Gary’s childhood and was gunned down by authorities in Alabama after an alleged murder incident.

Davis had exhibited an interest in music at an early age and built a guitar from a pie pan around the age of seven. He taught himself to play guitar, banjo, and harmonica and began playing local dances for the white folk while still a child.

In 1937 Davis married Annie Bell Wright, a woman as deeply spiritual as himself, and she looked after him devotedly until his death. In 1940, when the blues was losing popularity, they moved to Mamaroneck, New York, where Annie had found work as a housekeeper. Later that same year they moved to Harlem, where they lived for the next 18 years and where Davis became a minister of the Missionary Baptist Connection Church. He continued busking and preaching in New York, often referred to as the “Harlem Street Singer.” For a time he stopped playing blues music altogether in favour of gospel and old time songs. He also taught guitar, charging $5 for lessons that could last all day and into the night. As he became better known among folk aficionados, he made recordings for various companies, consenting little by little to revive some of his secular repertoire for the benefit of his white admirers. Among some of his students were Stefan Grossman (founder of the Guitar Workshop), Steve Katz (of Blood, Sweat and Tears), Bob Weir (of The Grateful Dead) and Dave Van Ronk. In a performance at the Gaslight Cafe in Manhattan, Davis famously referred to his disciples by saying “I have no children, but I have sons.”

In particular, the work of Stephan Grossman must be singled out. He met Gary Davis when he was only 15 years old, his dad driving him to the Bronx to take guitar lessons. Grossman led Davis to coffee shops, bar mitzvahs, dances and churches, where his wide range of styles suited any audience. Grossman often acted as Davis’ aide when deaing with municipal requirements, filling out forms and other paperwork impeded by his blindness.

As a teenager, learning was for me a process of hearing the song and trying to find the right notes on my guitar. At that time, there were a few recordings of masters like Gary Davis or Mississippi John Hurt but only on vinyl. Tape machines were rare, bulky, awkward and expensive. I remember being frustrated trying to learn to play from vinyl recordings – since my guitar was only tuned “by ear,” I struggled finding the right pitch and the notes played by those great guitarists 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 his 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. For me, New York City might as well have been Mars but I wrote in and it worked! 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 Grossman himself, are responsible for nurturing the aspirations of countless guitarists who wanted to learn the fingerpicking style. The Workshop is still active and now features many priceless video recordings of the great masters from the past.

My rendition of “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” is dedicated to the memory of my sister Marielle, who passed away last year, and of my brother Bob, who left us just this month.

Richard Séguin – voice and acoustic guitar

To hear the song, click on the title below

Death Don’t Have No Mercy

Copyright Disclaimer under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976 : allowance is made for « fair use » for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research.

When I was a teenager, I read some of the pop music magazines that were available at St-Jacques, the local pool hall and general store in Rockland. Other than the radio, there were no other media to inform you about what was happening in Britain and America, the vanguards of contemporary music at that time. When I started working at the age of 19, all the music from my youth was being replaced by new directions that I had very little faith in. At that time, I could finally afford my first instruments : a used Gibson acoustic guitar, a second-hand Gibson electric guitar and a cheap Fender banjo. Thanks to the influence of artists like Doc Watson and Mississippi John Hurt, I loved acoustic music and the more I delved into its past, the more I understood the migration of music from the rural southern United States to the industrial northern states. The music of the American post-war era became my bible.

Many black people from all walks of life migrated to the north for jobs and many of them settled in Chicago. One of these travellers was McKinley Morganfield (1913-1983), born in a Mississippi county that is not conclusively known. His grandmother, Della Grant, raised him after his mother died shortly after his birth. Grant gave him the nickname “Muddy” at an early age because he loved to play in the muddy water of nearby Deer Creek.

Muddy Waters grew up on Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi where the remains of the cabin where he lived in his youth are now preserved as the Delta Blues Museum. In August 1941, Alan Lomax, Assistant in Charge of the Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress, went to Stovall Plantation to record various country blues musicians including Muddy Waters, who played at that time with a fiddler named Henry “Son” Sims (1890-1958). Lomax came back in July 1942 to record them again. Both sessions were eventually released by Testament Records as an album entitled “Down on Stovall’s Plantation.”

In 1943, Muddy headed to Chicago with the hope of becoming a full-time professional musician. He lived with a relative while driving a truck, working in a factory by day and performing at night. In 1944, he bought his first electric guitar and then formed his first electric combo out of necessity. Electrifying his sound was the only way to be heard above the shouts, arguments, fights and flying beer bottles in the boisterous Chicago clubs of the era. The beer bottles in particular forced many musicians to play behind a protective fence of chicken wire.

In studying the evolution of blues music, you readily see that the modern concept of 12-bar blues was more and more incidental the further back you go. Artists like Mississippi Fred McDowell and John Lee Hooker played their music without being constrained by a rigid tempo. The music simply flowed organically. Being one of Muddy’s earliest recordings on Chess Records, “Louisiana Blues” follows along those lines. Muddy sings and plays guitar with Little Walter Jacobs on harmonica, Ernest “Big” Crawford on upright bass, and drummer Elgin Evans tapping on a piece of wood. It is blues at its very core, primal and unadorned.

“Louisiana Blues” makes mention of a “mojo hand.” In African-American spiritualism, a mojo is a spell that can be carried with or on the host’s body, consisting of a bag containing one or more magical items. Alternative American names for the mojo include gris-gris and mojo hand.

I add a mandolin on my version of “Louisiana Blues.” Although the mandolin has been associated with blues music since the days of W.C. Handy (1873-1958), I first heard it played in blues songs by the great James “Yank” Rachell (1910-1997) on some of the very influential recordings of Sleepy John Estes (1899-1977).

Richard Séguin – voice, slide guitar, Dobro resonator guitar, mandolin, sampled percussion.

Louisiana Blues

Copyright Disclaimer under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976 : allowance is made for « fair use » for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research.

I was lucky. Thanks to my older brother Gabriel, I got to know Elvis Presley in his prime. My brother, 14 years my senior and a keyboard player in a small local band, had a record collection that featured the best of black (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Ivory Joe Hunter, LaVern Baker) and white (Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, Duane Eddy, Eddie Cochran). My brother loved rock ‘n roll music, no matter what the colour of the artists and I grew up in the same way. Racism is a disease reserved for adults.

Such racial equality was a rare thing in the United States at that time. When I was a boy, the United States was a place of segregation in everything – human rights, public institutions, popular music, the record industry. In Canada, it was never an issue. I suspect that my parents were way too busy keeping a household of 9 people clothed and fed to bother with such things. My brother didn’t care and I never even once heard about the existence of different races as I grew up. I loved the music of Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis equally. I saw a picture of singer LaVern Baker at the age of 8 and she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. It never occurred to me that she was black.

In the early part of the 20th century, phonographs and phonograph records were most commonly distributed to white clients through furniture stores while blacks who could afford them bought phonograph records from Pullman porters working on the railroads that criss-crossed America. By the mid-1920s, all the major record companies in the U.S. were selling records made exclusively by and for African Americans, “race” records, as they were called.

Things remained the same until 1950, when a former disc jockey named Sam Phillips founded the Memphis Recording Service. Raised along side black people, working with them in the fields, Phillips recorded black amateur musicians and helped launch the careers of artists like B.B. King, Junior Parker, James Cotton, Rufus Thomas, Little Milton, Bobby Blue Bland and Howlin’ Wolf. The Memphis Recording Service also served as the studio for Phillips’s own label, Sun Record Company launched in 1952.

When he first heard Howlin’ Wolf, Phillips famously said “This is where the soul of man never dies.” What Phillips was searching for was a white man who could sing like a black man. As history would have it, that man was Elvis Presley (1935-1977). On July 18, 1953, Presley dropped into Sun studio to record a song for his mother’s birthday. Presley was what Sam Phillips had been searching for all along. Presley’s association with Phillips was a perfect storm. Phillips gave him the leeway and encouragement to go all out. They found the best songs for Presley’s exuberant style, some of them already recorded by then unknown black R&B artists like Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (1905-1974) (That’s Alright Mama) and Junior Parker (1932-1971) (Mystery Train). Black songwriter Otis Blackwell (1931-2002) was also a major contributor with his compositions “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up.”

To accompany Presley, Phillips used one of the best bands of the rock ‘n roll era, The Blue Moon Boys, with Bill Black (1926-1965) on upright bass, D.J. Fontana (1931-2018) on drums and Scotty Moore (1931-2016), one of the best guitarists in the history of rock ‘n roll. Elvis’ love of black R&B was apparent from the start – his first album in 1956 featured “Money Honey,” a song by Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters, and Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman.” His electrifying live shows showcased his wild gyrations that no one had ever seen before. In short order, Elvis was featured on television shows hosted by the Dorsey Brothers, Milton Berle, Steve Allen and Ed Sullivan. In particular, 60 million people, or 82.6 percent of the viewing population, tuned in to watch the Steve Allen show..

Certainly, black artists like Chuck Berry had magnificent moves but they were slick while Elvis was raw. His gyrations certainly created a storm of controversy. The Catholic diocese in Wisconsin notified the FBI that Elvis was a threat to national security by arousing the sexual passions of teenaged youth. Many renowned music critics toed the line and one wrote that “popular music has reached its lowest depths in the ‘grunt and groin’ antics of one Elvis Presley – an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos.” Ed Sullivan, whose TV show was the nation’s most popular, declared Presley “unfit for family viewing.” To Presley’s displeasure, he soon found himself being referred to as “Elvis the Pelvis”, which he called “childish.” The Steve Allen show, in particular, introduced a “new Elvis” in a white bowtie and black tails. Presley sang “Hound Dog” for less than a minute to a basset hound wearing a top hat and bowtie. Presley would refer back to the Allen show as the most ridiculous performance of his career.

Accompanying Presley’s rise to fame, a cultural shift was taking place that he both helped inspire and came to symbolize. The historian Martin Jezer wrote : “As Presley set the artistic pace, other artists followed. Presley, more than anyone else, gave the young a belief in themselves as a distinct and somehow unified generation—the first in America ever to feel the power of an integrated youth culture.”

After being drafted into the U.S. Army in late 1957, Presley reported to Fort Chaffee in Arkansas on March 24, 1958. They cut off his hair like they did for all recruits. He dressed like everyone else and was trained to obey. He went in the greatest Rock n’ Roll artist of his generation and came out looking like everybody else. Elvis Presley may have died in 1977 but to me and others, he died in 1958 at the hands of conformity. He returned to his career in 1960 but was never close to the artist he was in the 1950s.

Gillian Welch released “Elvis Presley Blues” in 2001 as part of her “Time (The Revelator)” CD. Her decision to insert into her song some of the lyrics from Presley’s 1956 hit “All Shook Up” is a stroke of genius.

Richard Séguin – voice, acoustic guitar, mandolin, sampled percussion

To hear the song, click on the title below.

Elvis Presley Blues

Copyright Disclaimer under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976 : allowance is made for « fair use » for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research.

“I’m Not Afraid To Die” is a song composed by Gillian Welch and included in her 1998 album entitled “Hell Among the Yearlings.” A version of the song was also separately released as a duo with singer-songwriter Willie Nelson, with slightly different lyrics.

Welch’s compositions incorporate elements of various American music styles, including country, folk, bluegrass, R&B and blues, resulting in a distinctive acoustic roots-oriented sound that is apart from the genres upon which they may be drawn.

Welch was born on October 2, 1967, in New York City, and was adopted by Mitzie Welch (née Marilyn Cottle) and Ken Welch, comedy and music entertainers. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz, Welch attended the Berklee College of Musicians in Boston where she majored in songwriting. During her two years at Berklee, Welch met her musical partner David Rawlings at a successful audition for Berklee’s country band. Moving to Nashville, the duo realized that their voices harmonized well and they started to performing locally. They never considered using a working name, so they were simply billed as “Gillian Welch.” A year after moving to Nashville, Welch found a manager, Denise Stiff, who ignored frequent advice that Welch should stop playing with Rawlings and join a band. They eventually signed a recording contract and producer T-Bone Burnett expressed interest in recording them. Burnett did not plan to disturb Welch’s and Rawlings’ preference for minimal instrumentation, and Welch agreed to take him on as a producer. The resulting recordings have met with universal acclaim.

Welch emphasizes music from a previous era as her major influence. She said that “by and large I listen to people who are dead. I’m really of the tried-and-true school. I let 50 years go by and see what’s really relevant.” Welch has acknowledged inspiration from several traditional country artists, including the Stanley Brothers, the Carter Family, the Louvin Brothers, and the Blue Sky Boys. She explained her relationship with traditional music by saying, “I’ve never tried to be traditional. It’s been a springboard for me and I love it and revere it and would not be doing what I do without the music of the Monroe Brothers, the Stanley Brothers and the Carter Family. However, it was clear I was never going to be able to do exactly that.”

Many thanks to my old friend Tom Butterworth for the loan of his dobro. A dobro has strings high off the neck and is designed to rest on your lap and be played overhand with a steel bar.

Richard Séguin – voice, acoustic guitars, mandolin, dobro.

To hear the song, click on the title below.

I’m Not Afraid To Die

Copyright Disclaimer under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976 : allowance is made for « fair use » for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research.