Kazoo Blues
August 10th, 2009 | 10:00 am est |
Among the last of the great old country blues players discovered in the 1960s, Robert Pete Williams was easily the most unique. His ragged griot approach to the blues paid little attention to standard rhymes or blues forms, but it allowed him the freedom to spin personalized stories of tremendous emotional power, even when he was working from traditional pieces like “Motherless Child” or “Poor Boy Long Ways from Home.” A great introduction to this wonderful musician is the very affordable Long Ol’ Way from Home, released by the reissue label Fuel 2000 in 2004. Made up of recordings taped by Norman Dayron at concerts Williams gave at the University of Chicago and Lake Forest College in early 1965, it shows a masterful performer at the top of his game, playing flawless acoustic guitar and singing like a man who is assured he has something to say, and that he’ll be heard saying it. Songs like “Bye, Bye Baby,” “Lord, I’m Going Back Home Blues,” and “My Mother Prayed in the World One Day” have a quiet power and intimacy that move them past the dim-lit world of blues history and into the hushed silence of a modern concert hall. The immediacy of these Chicago and Lake Forest performances are so compelling, that even a novelty number, the goofy “Kazoo Blues,” featuring a true blues kazoo (you’ll understand when you hear it), seems to reverberate with poignant vitality. Williams put so much heart into his work that there are really no bad albums out there under his name, but this one is special. Well-recorded, and with a intimate tone that is perfect for Williams and his material, these priceless performances should not be missed.
“Bye, Bye Baby”
“Lord, I’m Going Back Home Soon”
“Kazoo Blues”
“Poor Boy Long Ol’ Way from Home”
Today’s pop, rock, and rap stars owe more to William Bunch than they could ever realize. Bunch recognized way back in the 1920s that creating a bad-ass persona would do wonders for record sales, and drawing on a shady character from Black folklore, he re-christened himself Peetie Wheatstraw, claiming (long before Robert Johnson thought of it) that he had sold his soul to the devil down at the crossroads in exchange for success as a musician. It was a great calling card, and success he had, cutting upwards of 170 tracks for the ARC, Bluebird, and Decca labels before his death in 1941, and at his peak in the 1930s, he was the equivalent of a superstar.
The American medicine show came into its own shortly after the Civil War with the rise of so-called patent medicines and the almost complete lack of regulations concerning the ingredients that went into them, and any number of noxious tonics, elixirs, and nostrums with trumpeted healing powers were hawked by silver-tongued pitch doctors to the audiences who flocked to see the various acrobats, dancers, fire-eaters, snake handlers, comedians, and musicians who entertained at these free extravaganzas. As a cost efficient way of merging entertainment with merchandising (and where manufacturing meant mixing ingredients in a bathtub), these medicine shows successfully traveled the so-called “kerosene circuit” of rural and small-town America until the dawn of the 20th Century, when the rise of radio and movies and the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act combined to render them obsolete. The medicine show blueprint of offering free entertainment to attract audiences and then using intermissions to push products on them has hardly gone away, however, and is still the driving force behind radio and television in the 21st Century, and it’s the basic elixir for commerce all over the internet, too. The musicians working these colorful traveling medicine shows were professionals, at least professional enough to leave their home communities and take to the road, and luckily several of these musicians were still active in the 1920s and early 1930s when the fledgling recording industry was just getting off the ground, and numerous commercial 78s by former medicine show entertainers were issued in the prewar era.
The Black Keys - 
Robert Cray - 
Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup - 
Reverend Gary Davis - 
Dr. John and the Lower 911 - 
Holly Golightly and the Brokeoffs - 
Buddy Guy - 
B.B. King - 
Lil’ Ed & the Blues Imperials - 
Little Caesar - 
Memphis Minnie - 
Eli “Paperboy” Reed & The True Loves - 
Duke Robillard - 
Byther Smith - 
Mavis Staples - 
Susan Tedeschi - 
Watermelon Slim & the Workers - 
Various Artists - 
Various Artists - 
Various Artists - 
Various Artists - 
History has proven that Willie Nelson will duet with pretty much anybody that comes along, and while this open-hearted open mind sometimes backfires, more often than not it results in some of his most sublime recordings. 
