AllenLowe

what, no Xmas cards from Frank Driggs?

Dylan really did very little "protest" music - Hard Rain, Blowin in the Wind, With GOd on Our Side, Masters of War - even of the early stuff, most is non-protest - interesting about his voice, because the EARLY Dylan is really, in my opinion, in very fine voice - controlled, carefully modulated, very focused - this changed sometime in the 1970s and I now find his voice to be just mush. Lyrically he wrote some great things but was always, I think, a bit lazy and arrogant - wrote too much. Ironically enough, as he is called a poet all the time, I think his greatest importance is musical, in the development of the groupd sound in the beginnings of so-called folk rock. Brilliant anarchy on Bringing it Al Back Home, Highway 61, and Blond on Blond - but I honestly don't think Dylan's had a good idea in about 25 years -

oh no, you're not going to get me into a God discussion - though, to quote a song from an old Broadway show called Red White and Maddox (about the late Governor Lester Maddox), "God is an American..."

when such jokes were popular in the 1960s, one went: "If Sybil Burton (Richard Burton's ex) married Ish Kabibble, her name would be: Sybil Kabibbile."

sorry, I meant for de-crackle and de-pop -

rockefeller - what are you using for noise reduction?

it's pricey - about $4,000 currently, I think, for a free-standing unit - I haven't checked the prices in about 2 years, however -

well, I usually ignore my own posts -

well, in that case, I'll send you MY stuff - off course, I've done stuff for Rhino and Sony and NPR - I assume you have similar credits -

about LP to CD - I did this for a living for about 10 years - it's pretty easy, but I have a CEDAR - for $25 I do a single transfer throught he de-noiser, using audiophile turntable and pre-amp and amp - this removes about 90 percent of the noise. I don't do it much anymore because everybody's got their own stuff - but I have yet to hear an inexpensive commercial de-crackler program that does half as good a job as CEDAR -

I thought Chuck Nessa was Che - but you can ignore that, too -

I thought the literary allusion was to the word "neck" -

well, I'll say again, per Eric, that the problem is that everything is put under the umbrella of the blues - now with Teagarden he was definitely using blues techniques, learned from songs utilizing the blues chord progression, on non-blues songs - but to say my argument is too strict would be to allow us to call anything rhythm changes as long as we feel the connection to rhythm changes - and in reality it's either rhythm changes or it ain't, and if it ain't, it ain't - it doesn't matter that the 1-6-2-5 chord progression is related, or that the bridge uses certain harmonic cycles that other progressions use - - by using blues to label everything we are doing a gross disservice to the music and not allowing ourselves to look outside of that tradition - and, as well, we are confusing cause and effect - blues is effect as much as cause, it is the result (effect) of techniques of pitch and rythm as filtered through African American experiences and it is the cause of certain applied techniques, and has enriched a lot of music - but it is only a portion (if a large portion) of the picture of African American and American music -

Levine is Peretti's mentor? A good argument for fratricide -

to me the ultimate issue is not blues vs non-blues but how the music and it's changes fit into the big picture of African American culture and African American methods of transformation - that's why, sorry to be a repeater pencil, the Levine book is a MUST -

well, I would say the roots of soul are in the hard gospel movement, which has it's origins in the 1920s with the emergence of a freer, post-jubilee sound (greater use of floating lead singer); in 1937 the Soul Stirrers recorded "Walk Around" which is incredibly modern and free, and it is from this idea of lead singer vs group that we see the soul singer emerge (and later Archie Brownleee with the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi) - r&b has complicated roots and development; it's rhythms really come out, initially, of the swing era and can be traced through certain commercial big bands (like Lucky Millinder and Buddy Johnson) to the more small-group oriented work of the 1950s. Let me add that, per all of this, that there is a book, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, by Lawrence Levine, which is essential reading - no other source traces the roots and development and causes of AfricanAmerican culture as clearly and powerfully as Levin does. If you're at all intersted in the subject, you should check it out. It has helped me immeasurably in evalutating and clarifying my own positions -

I have a feeling the origins of the blues will forever remain obscure - if I had to give an overall theory, the multi-stanza'd repeated format had been around for some time (eg "It takes a worried man..." or "going down the road feeling bad ") as well as the 1-4-1-5-4-1 (Frankie and Johnny) - somehow somewhere someone saw how nicely they fit together - and did so - it may very well have been a professional songwriter; there is a guy named Peter Muir who is doing some relevant research on Hughie Cannon, who wrote Bill Bailey, which contains, in the verse, a blues format - the reason I am such a stickler for calling the 1-4-1-5-4-1 progression the blues is because that is really what it is - anything else has other antecedents, other form, other origins and should be recognized as such - as for Peretti, I would not say his work is riddled with errors, it is just that he has no original insights, and we can get the info he gives from other places; he has just taken a lot of other people's work and cut and pasted it. If you need some better research sources I can probably help you -

I think it would be a fun idea to keep a tally - to see who is on the most ignore lists -

and another thing - ------------------------------

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what will this allow us to ignore? I missed something -

Eric: the problem with Peretti is that he makes outright mistakes and repeats conventional wisdom as though it's historical revelation - he just repeats what others have said and puts it into an obvious context (I know you're going to ask what mistakes but I don't have his books on hand - threw 'em away, to be honest); Lewis Erenburg is another - I'm reading his book (written not that long ago) and what does he do but cite the myth of Bessie Smith dying because she was not admitted to a White hospital! Embarrasing stuff - Cathy Ogren tells us that Ballin' the Jack had sexual connotations - HELP! This, however, is academia -

hey Brad, that kind of response is counter-productive - Chuck can take it - and so can Che -

eric - I agreee with you essentially - the point that has been made, however, is that blues has become something of a generic term -

it's blues, baby, blues - when you can't even see your shoes...