Good Rocking Mama (Blues)
August 14, 2008 at 11:22 am
Well, it tells the story about women and men. That’s what music is all about. It’s about being human and love and hate. You hear the blues talk about “my woman have left me.” “I love you baby.” “Honey, don’t go.” “Come on back.” You talking about a woman, you talking about a man. They feel different things. Every song I write says something about a human being, just like a man write about a woman. I don’t write about no man! [Laughs.] I wrote about a woman for a song called “Dimples,” you know. [Sings "She got dimples in her jaw."] She says, “Well, I like that,” because it saying good things about her. “She got dimples in her jaw.” “I like the way she walk.” “She wiggle when she walks.” You know, they like stuff like that. You ain’t gonna write a song called “I Hate You-You’re No Good.” They wouldn’t like that! So you got to say good things about women-they love it then. - John Lee Hooker
“The Root List”
01. John Lee Hooker - Good Rocking Mama
The Big Soul Of John Lee Hooker (Collectables, 1962)
02. Son House - Death Letter
Father Of The Delta Blues (1965)
03. Bo Diddley - She’s Fine, She’s Mine
Bo Diddley (1955)
04. Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band - Sure ‘Nuff ‘N Yes I Do
Safe As Milk (Buddha, 1967)
05. R.L. Burnside - Walkin`Blues
A Ass Pocket of Whiskey (Fat Possum, 1996)
06. Minutemen - Polarity
What Makes a Man Start Fires? (Sst Records, 1982)
07. Shellac - Song against itself
1000 Hurts (Touch & Go Records, 2000)
note: Something root. When everything is blur, there is always blues to center on. That’s my general take when music turns confusing at least, when I want to create new center of mood. Amazingly it always work. Few tunes above are from my favorite artists, with delicate and precise picking. Dark, soulful, isolated, but fast. Never desperate. I particularly like how tempo pattern change to make the limited blues combinations interesting. They are timeless. Anyway, a short blues list. Root. Timeless.
see also: the blues (PBS), Mapping the Blues Genes: Early Blues Music: 1900-1930
image: puja
Random blues pages from the net.
http://frank.mtsu.edu/~baustin/blues.html
During the decades of the thirties and forties, the blues spread northward with the migration of many blacks from the South and entered into the repertoire of big-band jazz. The blues also became electrified with the introduction of the amplified guitar. In some Northern cities like Chicago and Detroit, during the later forties and early fifties, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, and Elmore James among others, played what was basically Mississippi Delta blues, backed by bass, drums, piano and occasionally harmonica, and began scoring national hits with blues songs. At about the same time, T-Bone Walker in Houston and B.B. King in Memphis were pioneering a style of guitar playing that combined jazz technique with the blues tonality and repertoire. (RSR&RE 53)
Pavarotti, take one.
nice playlist squashed
“When everything is blur, there is always blues to center on. ….”
I hear ya’ and understand. It’s not just limited to Blues but Blues does have an epiphany about it, in the most illustrative moments of being. It’s there at the right time at the right moment in an collaboration that is somehow seamless, as if waiting to adhere to ourselves at the most necessary moment.
Robert Johnson, Lightning Hopkins and perhaps even Alberta Hunter are some names that I would add to the ensemble delivered by the link you include in the first comment.