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Midweek Music Break: The Essex, “Easier Said Than Done”
In 1961, a couple of US Marines stationed in Okinawa — Rodney Taylor and Walter Vickers – formed a vocal duo with the slightly odd name “The Essex.” Shortly thereafter, they were reassigned to Camp LeJeune in North Carolina; there, they added a couple of their fellow leathernecks, Billy Hill and Rudolph Johnson. They even encountered a [...]
Midweek Music Break: Louis Armstrong, “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York”
Louis Armstrong’s public persona so often seemed so happy-go-lucky, so ingratiating, that the song “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York” — from the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess — seems to fit him like a glove. It comes across as a bouncy, jaunty tease. Without the context of the surrounding plot, here’s what we hear: [...]
Midweek Music Break: Jim James/The New Multitudes, “Talking Empty Bed Blues”
I posted a few months ago about a recent project, led by Bob Dylan, to record the “lost notebooks” of Hank Williams. It so happens that 2012 marks the centennial of the birth of another great songwriter (and Dylan hero), Woodie Guthrie; and a new album, The New Multitudes, has just been released, of Guthrie’s [...]
Midweek Music Break: The Playmates, “Beep Beep”
I’ve been thinking for a while of doing theme-type Midweek Music Breaks for a little variety, such as one on car music: songs about cars. As opposed to conventional “road trip” music, I mean, or songs by groups named after cars (like The Fleetwoods, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, and, uh, The Cars). I may still do [...]
Midweek Music Break: Ciara Sidine, “Take Me Down”
[Image: "Ciara and Conor [Brady], acoustic set, Shadow Road Shining launch at Sugar Club, Dublin, 13 May 2011″ (from her FB page)] The [mostly imaginary] scene: Dublin, Ireland, in the offices of a large publishing firm, sometime in the still young twenty-first century. An experienced, highly respected editor sits looking dreamily out a window of her [...]
Midweek Music Break: Hayes Carll, “Another Like You”
Thanks to all the new(ish) music I’ve been listening to over the last couple years, I’ve found myself a fan of a genre I didn’t even know existed. It’s sort of a loose super-genre, actually: Americana or “roots music,” incorporating elements of bluegrass, folk, country/western, blues, rock… The instrumentation and arrangement lean acoustic-wards, and often [...]
Midweek Music Break: Pendyrus Male Choir, “Cwm Rhonnda“
[Image: the valley of the Rhondda] I’ve mentioned before that while writing Seems to Fit, I used a variety of musical playlists to put me in the proper frame of mind for a given chapter. The selections on the day’s playlist were among those which (so I imagined) would be favorites of the character most heavily [...]
Midweek Music Break: Loreena McKennitt, “Down by the Sally Gardens”
Loreena McKennitt seems to love anything which hitches the adjective Celtic to the noun music. She’s traveled the world to record music both Celtic and Celtic-like, often (even on brand-new songs) using instruments which might have been recognized 2,000 years ago across the whole range of the Celts’ distribution. She’s certainly traveled farther afield than many [...]
Midweek Music Break: Dominant Legs, “Make Time for the Boy”
From a group named “Dominant Legs,” what in the hell sort of music should we expect? Tina Turner in black leather, maybe? I can’t say I have a ready answer to the question. But it wouldn’t have been, for me, something like this: a Lynchian, sweetly blissed-out, dream-dancing, burbling-organ, saxophone-accented, group-sing throwback of a pop song: [...]
Midweek Music Break: Booker T. and the MGs, “Time Is Tight”
When people think of music in the 1960s-’70s, of soul music, they think automatically of the Motown record label. But there was a heck of a lot going on further south then, too, down in Memphis: the home of Stax Records. Originally Satellite Records, the company was forced to change its name in response to a [...]
