Another guest post from Babs!
In 1969 and 1970 [states Babs, after consulting her Filofax] Kent Records released
‘Anthology Of The Blues’, a 12-volume LP series of recordings originally
made for the Bihari brothers' (Lester, Jules, Saul and Joe) Modern
label in the 1940s and 1950s.
It was in 1969 when Jerry (my future husband) and I first came across the ‘Anthology Of The Blues’ series, at Canterbury Records (it’s still in business) in Pasadena, CA, which was a short walk from California Institute of Technology. Back then, it was run by a gentleman named Lenny, who was a hysterically funny man and had expert knowledge of Jazz. One Saturday, Jerry and I stopped in to look through the record bins. When we entered the store, Jerry greeted us and told us he had some new releases of old Blues records. Lenny showed me ‘Vol. 1 The Legend Of Elmore James’ looking at the track list on the back of the record, there were a few tracks I was familiar with, but most of them I had never heard. It was the same with ‘Vol. 2 Memphis Blues’ and ‘Vol. 3 California Blues’. Lenny told us they weren’t selling that well, and he thought it was because of the covers that mostly featured African-American children. I told Lenny, I thought they were charming, and Lenny said, “Well, you know how some people are” and rolled his eyes. Over the next few months we bought all the volumes released in 1969, and the 1970 releases in Boston, MA. where we moved to further our studies.
Three of the Bihari Bros with BB King
The Bihari brothers, and Modern Records
In
the late '40s and early '50s, Modern Records was able to attract many
fine blues performers to the labels, including B.B. King, Roscoe Gordon,
Elmore James, Smokey Hogg, Lightnin' Hopkins, Little Willie
Littlefield, Jimmy McCracklin, Jimmy Witherspoon, Pee Wee Crayton and
John Lee Hooker. Modern also leased masters from Sam Phillips in
Memphis, and was the first label to release material by the legendary
Howlin' Wolf. A split between the Bihari brothers and Sam Phillips
occurred when Phillips started leasing the Wolf masters to Chess in
Chicago
A very young Ike Turner
In the mid-'50s Joe Bihari made several trips into the
Deep South to gather field recordings of living, breathing juke joint
blues players, and the recordings he brought back weren't quaint,
archaic folk pieces but raw and raucous slices of electric blues.
Bihari's guide in all of this was a young Ike Turner, who was Joe’s
right-hand man, chauffeur, and played piano (not guitar) on many tracks.
The resulting material is moonshine loose, charmingly rough, ragged,
and they hit like the proverbial “ton of bricks”!
In common with
almost all record companies at the time, the Biharis would often add
their names to the writing credits to get some of the cash from
publishing royalties. Jules was ‘Jules Taub’, Joe was ‘Joe Josea’ and
Saul was ‘Sam Ling’. For example, John Lee Hooker’s ‘Turn Over a New
Leaf’ is credited to Hooker/Ling. On the other hand the brothers were
music fans, and very approachable characters, as many of their artists
have noted. The Modern label went bankrupt in the mid 60s, so the
brothers set up Kent Records, which bought the Modern group’s back
catalogue. They continued producing new Blues and R&B records until
Saul’s death in 1975, at the age of 56.
For the most part, I'm not a
big fan of Blues compilations, as I find them pedestrian or fine for
beginners, have the usual hits such as Elmore James ‘Dust My Broom’,
Muddy Waters ‘Mannish Boy’, John Lee Hooker ‘Boogie Chillen’ and other
Blues classics we’ve all heard thousands of times. ‘Anthology of the
Blues’ is different, while it has Blues giants such as Elmore James,
John Lee Hooker, B.B. King and Howlin' Wolf, the songs included are what
I like to call: “deep cuts”. It also has lesser known Blues artists,
but equally talented artists, who should be more well known, including:
Willie Nix, Big Bill Dotson, Charlie Bradix, James "Peck" Curtis and
many others. In my eye, these twelve LPs belong in every Blues
collection.
So here’s the 12-volume series: ‘Anthology of the Blues’
Yes, 12 albums - count 'em!
Vol. 1 The Legend Of Elmore James
Vol. 2 Memphis Blues
Vol. 3 California Blues
Vol. 4 Blues From The Deep South
Vol. 5 Texas Blues
Vol. 6 Detroit Blues
Vol. 7 Arkansas Blues
Vol. 8 Lightnin' Hopkins: A Legend In His Own Time
Vol. 9 Mississippi Blues
Vol. 10 The Resurrection Of Elmore James
Vol. 11 B.B. KING 1949-1950
Vol. 12 West Coast Blues
Enjoy!
[When Babs has finished walkin' the dog, puttin' on the Ritz, doin' the mashed potato 'n' dustin' her broom, she'll be along to ask you a question. Answer correctly and this fine set of albums can be yours.]
To qualify for twelve, count 'em, twelve of the finest Blues songs, ever put on wax.
ReplyDeleteTell us about your first blues record.
Lightnin' Hopkins (Folkways LP). I randomly chose this album at the library to learn about the blues. It blew me away. The loping then incisive guitar playing, close-miked vocals, the sound of his voice. It didn't seem like he was playing the blues...he just seemed to be the blues and was having a conversation with me on the back porch. I played this LP over and over and over. And I still do.
DeleteA budget label reissue of "Folk Festival Of The Blues" with Muddy, Wolf and Guy, if it's black blues we're talking here.
DeleteOtherwise, Mayall and Clapton's Beano album.
If I recall correctly the first album by a bonafide blues artist I ever bought was "I Am The Blues" by Willie Dixon. Not the most auspicious start but I eventually got down the road to better things.
DeleteI remember being interested in hearing the originals of shake your money maker, Crawling King Snake, spoonfull, crossroads etc as discovered through F Mac, Doors and Cream, but to my 14yrold ears I couldn't appreciate them, so after that it had to wait until :
ReplyDeleteGolden Hour presents the great bluesmen 1976
Brownie Mc Ghee And Sonny Terry*– Key To The Highway
Big Bill Broonzy– Louise Louise Blues
Jesse Fuller– San Francisco Bay Blues
Mississippi John Hurt– Moaning The Blues
Sleepy John Estes– Mailman Blues
Sam 'Lightnin' Hopkins*– Cotton Field Blues
John Lee Hooker– Tupelo
Muddy Waters– Nineteen Years Old
Junior Wells– Stormy Monday
Homesick James And The Dusters*– Dust My Broom
Jimmy Cotton Blues Quartet– The Blues Keep Falling
Otis Rush Blues Band*– It's A Mean Old World
Big Walter Horton's Blues Harp Band With Memphis Charlie*– Rockin' My Boogie
Otis Spann's South Side Piano– Sometimes I Wonder
Junior Wells Chicago Blues Band*– Help Me (A Tribute To Sonny Boy Williamson)
Buddy Guy's Chicago Blues Band– One Room Country Shack
Junior Wells And His Chicago Blues Band*– Little By Little
I loved them all, and a few years later was playing it to a mate after a session at the pub, for us to be discovered by my wife sat in the arm chairs snoring our heads off, with the record going round and round on the inner groove.
It was the Stones who really opened my ears (and I'm sure, many other people's) to blues. From the off, they covered people like Slim Harpo, Willie Dixon, Jimmy Reed and Muddy. It then started to become easier to hear the originals as record companies began to re-release them.
DeleteA cheap ass bootleg-type various artists collection called "Blues Classics" I fished out of a bargain bin for a buck (name, hint hint). As a matter of fact, it was so cheap and chintzy, that they obliviously included stuff purely on the presence of the word 'blues' alone, thus the appearance of Steely Dan's "Deacon Blues" (SIC!), credited to Chuck Berry (SIC!!). It did have a lot of the heavy hitters: JohnLee Hooker, B.B. King, Elmore, Howlin' Wolf etc. Plus the same Canned Heat track that everyone put on their cheapie comps at that same time...
ReplyDeleteJust been wandering around the local charity shops and couldn't resist spending £1 on a book on how to play the blues harp by Tony 'Little Sun' Glover from 1965. It ties in nicely with the above and also my ramblings on Ray 'Jacka' Jackson. Some nice pics of blues guys and some amusing illustrations of how to play the 'harp' through your ear or through a glass. The language is "of it's time", and these days it would probably have warning stickers slapped all over it.
ReplyDeleteDoing a quick goggle at the internet, I see he recorded a number of times and taught Mick Jagger how to play the mouth organ. He also did the sleeve notes to the official Dylan at the ' Manchester Free Trade "Albert" Hall. I'ld never heard of him before, but I bet Babs has!
Glover is probably best known for this trio linked to below. They were often mentioned by hip UK folkies in the 60s - in the same breath as people like Jansch and Graham, but obviously totally different styles of music.
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koerner,_Ray_%26_Glover
My first Blues record was John Lee Hooker's "Boom Boom", with "Drug Store Woman" on the flipside.
ReplyDelete"Boom Boom" was given to me by my friend Blue, who was a DJ in my father's nightclub. It was in a pile of 45s, that he no longer played. By the time I got it in 1963, it was a year old. I wrote a piece about my father's nightclub, and Blue over at False Memory Foam. If you missed it, you can read it here.
https://falsememoryfoam.blogspot.com/2021/09/babs-n-blue-take-night-train.html
Jesse Fuller - San Francisco Bay Blues
ReplyDeletehttps://mega.nz/file/zJdwTQZJ#T4_CfzlPqZK1aTj5NzJkMF4_V0hfmYHbpWpFFwkV4Jw
Having collected my thoughts (and shaken off the initial déjà vu kind of feeling), I'm ready to take a few guesses. Hope one or another of these answers is correct!
ReplyDeleteAlthough I've lived in Southern California for decades -- roughly two miles away from Canterbury Records, as it happens -- I grew up near London. During the early- to mid-1970s, I attended what in those olden days would have been known as a grammar school. Somewhere in there, a couple of the teachers established a Blues Appreciation Club. So I and a few other yobboes would sometimes go to a certain classroom at lunchtime, serve as witnesses while an officiant approached the turntable, and then sit in silence listening to . . . um, actually, all I can remember listening to on those occasions would be Robert Johnson, which very well could, in a sense, be my first blues record.
When I told my friend Martin about the club, he said his older brother, currently overseas in the armed forces, had a really big blues collection and would not mind in the slightest were I to "borrow" some of those records in the interim. I spent quite a few weeks becoming familiar with Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley -- mostly artists on Chess, as it now occurs to me, but a decent sampling from the pantheon nonetheless. One day, I heard a knock on the door, and this gargantuan, fearsomely martial-looking fellow was at the threshold saying "I'm Martin's brother and I'm here for me records." I may have said, "Yes, Sir," or I may have made a sort of squeaking sound, or I may have done a bit of both; but in any case I managed within seconds to form the records into a nice, neat stack, and that was the end of that. So much for "my" other first blues records!
But I do have to say that, for me, the most important first blues record of all turned out to be the "Story of the Blues" (Volume One) collection put together by Paul Oliver. I still think that's a great, great compilation with something for pretty much everybody.
Here's the link to a bucket o' blues:
ReplyDeletehttps://mega.nz/file/kXN1yAiT#NUSKT4NiH3m7oXE6pUerGs5zoWPaisEInwEfazjB0Pw
@Nobby - A first edition, in excellent condition of Tony's book is worth "mucho dinero".
Also, Tony didn't teach Mick to play harp per se, however he did give Mick pointers on how to play in the style of Jimmy Reed.
These look great! I see what you mean about the track choice - two albums of Elmore James and no version of "Dust my Broom"!
DeleteHi Babs, not sure what the dinero/gbp exchange rate is, but the only first edition I could see was for £15.00! Never mind, I'm really "digging" (his words, not mine) reading it.
Deletei hope someone can tell me the name of the song and the artist of my first blues record. i must have been about 10 and got it fromv kresges or woolworth's used 45 bin. (located next to the delicious smelling freshly sliced ham and hard rolls special of the week)
ReplyDeleteall i remember is a guy telling his gal to get herself "one of them good jobs..like a hod carrier or somethin'! ". the 45 is long lost. i had no idea what a hod carrier was.
I've just played Vol 5 Texas Blues. Really good stuff! Jesse Thomas - track 4 - superb. Solo electric playing boogie woogie lines with chords really impressed me.
ReplyDeleteMany thanks for putting me on to Jesse Thomas, Babs. He's amazing - equally at home with rootsy blues and jump material, he's not quite like anyone I've heard before. Here's a collection of his earlier stuff that I think you might enjoy.
Deletehttps://workupload.com/file/PAaKhPGt5xh
My pleasure, Steve!
DeleteThe 48-58 sides you linked, are all classics.
Here's Jesse's "Blues is a Feeling", from 1992, when he was 81 years young.
https://mega.nz/file/0XkQxIwa#O6FOOki6FPvUUyXsutt85XN5wjteV9xi_e5wnRc0sag
Enjoy!
Many thanks, Babs!
DeleteBabs, I just wanted to thank you for the Stones Mickboy remix of Goats Head Soup that you posted at The IOF last month, splendid, just confirmed to me how great Goats Head is, thanks. I've only got round to listening the Mickboy mix this week.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you like it, Bambi.
DeleteTo me, Goats Head, is criminally underappreciated.
I took a jazz class at Loyola - Los Angeles taught by Leonard Feather, and among the guests performing at the class was B. B. King. After classs, I rushed down to the only place I could afford music, the St. Vincent DePaul Thrift Store, and St. Vinny was lookin' out for me, because there, in near-perfect condition were two of his Kent records. Oh yeah....that's gettin' a reward for livin' right!
ReplyDeleteYikes! Looks like some of us have found questional company again.
ReplyDelete