Toadcast #93 – The Craigcast
I have a friend Craig who works in Waterstones and is an obsessive about old American folk music and, more specifically, blues. He has been making Neil Meursault mix CDs for ages, which I’ve heard and consistently found myself asking what the hell I was listening to.
I usually hate the tedious collections of old blues music which seem to always adorn Uncut covers when they ask bands to name their formative influences, but some of the really scratchy old recordings Craig put on his CDs were amazing, so erm… this is the podcast I guess.
At last – someone who actually knows what he’s talking about!
Toadcast #93 – The Craigcast
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01. Blind Boy Fuller – Rattlesnakin’ Daddy (02.57)
02. Charley Patton – Pea Vine Blues (12.34)
03. Big Joe Williams – Baby Please Don’t Go (18.54)
04. Willie Brown – Future Blues (22.16)
05. Skip James – Hardtime Killing Floor Blues (31.32)
06. Robert Johnson – Hellhound on My Trail (39.57)
07. Muddy Waters – I Can’t Be Satisfied (50.54)
08. Muddy Waters – Trouble No More (57.16)
09. Howlin’ Wolf – Spoonful (59.54)
10. Mississippi Fred McDowell – Fireman Ring the Bell (71.15)
Amazing, amazing stuff. Kudos to Craig. If people are interested in digging deeper, like I am, eMusic has a lot of early blues available for download.
They also have all the Smithsonian Folkways stuff, which is incredible.
Amazing work… Craig is a legend.
Far too grown up for you Matthew … which is why it’s fun to listen to. Blues history and fun don’t normally go together. It’s a good format.
Go Craig ! Great stuff.
I’ve just come back from Mississippi. I also now know where the delta ends – New Orleans bo’ !
It’s still such fertile muscial ground. From New Orleans to Memphis and across to Nashville I heard amazing music played to such a high standard in local bars and clubs. I came away with a similar conclusion to your evening’s chat – which is that to European ears, blues, jazz and country are the foundations of recorded music yet when you hear it in context over there, it’s still very much a folk-style tradition with people playing ‘sessions’ in bars in a similar sense as folk is played in Scotland and Ireland. It took me a couple of days to appreciate these folk weren’t covers bands, they’re playing the music that comes from that place.
And yes … you can’t copyright what is essentially culture !
Yeah, apart from a notable difference in narrative style – personal stories in the first person, versus more generalised tales – we didn’t come up with much of a difference between folk stuff and blues and decided that as far as we knew it was basically the same thing.
Don’t worry Morgs, Part Two is going to be something of a mess, so the craziness will be restored.
can’t believe this is the first one of these i’ve listened to on here. good stuff! as an utterly essential starting point to all this old time scratchy goodness (and a thoroughly thorough record collection) i’d recommend harry smith’s anthology of american folk music on the aforementioned smithsonian folkways. even the fact it’s all on cd can’t disguise the sheer fucking beauty of the set.
and if yr feeling adventurous (and columbo-esque) try and track down some of the mississippi records blues/folk releases. or more likely since they’re such limited vinyl runs, download them from somewhere.
Yes, true.
I guess what still surprises me though, is that jazz is from the same place as blues with only slight differences in influence. And again, over here we view it a bit as something that stopped evolving in a folk style and became more formalised, yet it seems to live on New Orleans in much the same way as it began. It’s kind of nice to know that these tunes are still being passed around a community of people who knew or at least feel a connection with the authors. Could you say that this is essentially what makes anything ‘folk’ ?
Well I’m not sure. With folk the original authors and composers are often lost in the mists of time. Blues is a much more recent tradition, so there’s a much higher chance of the original actually being known, I think. But I have said that actual blues (as opposed to commercial blues) basically operates in the folk tradition and was basically just the folk music of a particular time and place, rather than something separate – not to negate its individual identity.
I’ve only just got round to listening to this, but more early blues please. Absolutely loved this podcast with a good few early blues tracks I hadn’t heard too.
Now to try an find some of these on old vinyl…
Very very tricky, actually. Old jazz seems to be a lot more readily available, but I’ve hardly ever seen old blues.
Yeah that’s what I thought would be the case, I’ve barely seen it either but I haven’t been actively looking too much before.
Very few people I know have any idea about early blues at all (not that I know much), it seems underappreciated all over the place. As much as I like that Emusic has a good bit on offer I feel it is a genre that really benefits from the album-long play and crackle that I like from vinyl.