paul secor

The best Booker by far is Junco Partner on Hannibal http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?pid=1006228. It was originally issued as an Island LP in the 1970's and I highly recommend it. My favorite live Booker is on an LP - Blues & Ragtime from New Orleans (Aves) - don't know if it's ever made it to CD. Spiders on the Keys and Resurrection of the Bayou Majarajah (Rounder) are live recordings from the Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans - Booker in his milieu. Erratic, but worth listening to and wading through. One last one - The Lost Paramount Tapes - Recorded in 1973 in Hollwood with a band. Not perfect, but worth listening to for some good Booker. By all accounts, James Booker was never truly captured on record, but Junco Partner came the closest imo. That's the one to go to first.

Isn't What Are You Listening To Right Now "Album of the Moment" minus discussion?

Louis Opal Nations' notes state that "Little Axe" "was in in fact a man living as a woman". I've read elsewhere that it was just the opposite - "Little Axe" was a woman who lived as a man. Whatever the case, Willmer "Little Axe" Broadnax was a great singer - that's all that matters.

Some time ago, I read In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle, a book chronicling a season with the women's high school basketball team in Amherst, Massachusetts. At least twice in the book, reference is made to Archie "Schepp". I meant to write a letter to the publisher mentioning the misspelling, but never got around to it. A year or so later, when the paperback edition was published, it was still "Schepp".

Paule Marshall dedicated her novel, The Fisher King: For the Memory of my cousin, Sonny Clement, baritone sax Earl Griffith, vibes Ernie Henry, alto sax I wrote Ms. Marshall a letter asking about the dedication, and she answered, saying that Earl Griffith and Ernie Henry were childhood friends. She also said that Ernie Henry died as the reult of a drug overdose.

Ken Nelson produced some of my favorite Merle Haggard and Gene Vincent records. A heartfelt thank you for what you did for the music, Mr. Nelson.

I tried "sunra" on the search function and came up with 2 pages of results. I would think that there has been more Sun Ra action on the board than that - though I might be wrong.

A warm welcome to the board. Hope you'll have much to say about your father and other subjects.

All the best to you on Your Birthday!

A Very Happy Birthday to you, Patricia!

Never took to Elvis early on - back then, thought that he was for the girls. Chuck Berry was my main man - to me, he was "The King". Took me til the mid 70's to hear Elvis' Sun stuff and to appreciate what he did.

Thanks for straightening out out the Baobab recordings, MG. I have a few Baobabs, but was never sure how the recordings I didn't have fit in. At least now I have a sense of what's what. A wonderful band, at any rate. Everyone should try to hear them.

The Happiest of Birthdays to you, Clifford!

The Alligator issue has the same title, One More for the Road. CD Universe has it in stock - http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?pid=1011886

Separated by genre, then by artist, then by recording date. Guess that sounds pretty uptight, but it lets me find things most of the time - except for the stuff I haven't gotten around to filing.

Blue Side Records was evidently a branch of Upside Records. Blue Side is the name on the label & cover. The copyright is Upside records & in small print - "Manufactured and Marketed by Upside records, Inc.". Thanks very much Dan & Paul. I'll have a look round for this one. MG Might be easiest to pick up the Alligator CD - still in print.

You are obviously an amateur drinker. Uh, can everybody else leave the room now? This is about to get ugly...

Blue Side Records was evidently a branch of Upside Records. Blue Side is the name on the label & cover. The copyright is Upside records & in small print - "Manufactured and Marketed by Upside records, Inc.".

There's a short recorded intro on the Uptown where he refers to himself as Mike Marmarosa. Makes one wonder how he felt about the nickname he acquired.

What WAS that album? There's some other album with Harold Ousley on it on which Earl plays, but I can't think which. MG, its One More For The Road on Demon Records. And that is a great record, btw. Hell yeah! But I think it was also issued with 1 or 2 different songs on Alligator, no? One More For the Road was originally issued on Blue Side Records in 1986. The Alligator issue replaced "He's Got You" and "get Yourself Another Fool" with "I Stepped in Quicksand" and "You Changed My Life". It is a great record - the best I've heard from Charles Brown's comeback years. Sorry to take any attention from Earl May's passing. A heartfelt thanks to Mr. May for all of the music he gave us over many years. As someone (just checked - Jim S.) mentioned earlier, the interview in Cadence is well worth reading.

I don't know if it's so, either - nor the reverse. But music on the radio is free (at least at the point of delivery) and I doubt whether that fact led to music being devalued by the several generations who have grown up in the radio age. I suspect that there are people who are really into music - us lot for example - and a whole lot more who just like it; and probably those proportions don't change much from one generation to another. My feeling is that a young person's ipod is much like a transistor radio was in the sixties. You carried it around everywhere, annoying people as much as you could. Ipods seem very frequently to be used in the same way as a tranny: putting your tunes on random shuffle seems to me not unlike listening to pop radio, where you hear the same songs repeated every so often, until the record goes off the chart, when it's replaced with something else. Viewed in that light, perhaps it's not too difficult to see why someone wouldn't want to pay. And perhaps this is "normal". In the period up to the late sixties, the single (78 or 45) was the unit of music. In the late sixties, an even more prosperous youth (than the generation before) found that LPs were the thing, with the development of Rock. But that paradigm itself seems to be changing and people are now more concerned with individual tracks/songs. This certainly seems to be reflected in the CDs issued of modern dance music, which are more like various artists compilations - but put together out of new, not recycled, material. So, is it possible that people are merely returning to a more normal view of music as individual performances, and that the album thing was a brief oddity. I wonder if someone like Noj could contribute some ideas along this line. MG You make some good points, especially about the radio, but I feel that what you're talking about is pop music. 78's and 45's weren't the unit of music for jazz or classical music - at least not in the 50's and 60's. And, at least in my listening time, you couldn't hear a lot of jazz on the radio, and what was there was limited in scope. You had to buy the LPs if you wanted to hear the music.

Don't know that I agree with that. I know a fair number of young people who have as much or more money as I had when I was in college in in my early 20's. Most of them choose to spend their money on things other than music - probably because they can get music for free. Hm, but do they have as much money as you do now? In the days when I was poor, I DID tape lots of LPs off friends. As I became better off, I bought them all. MG They probably don't have as much money as I do now, but I did buy records back when I didn't have much money.

Recently read David Fulmer's Rampart Street, the latest in a series of mysteries which take place in New Orleans in the early 1900's, and feature a Creole detective, Valentin St. Cyr, as the protagonist. Nothing special in terms of mystery plotting, and Fulmer's writing can occasionally be somewhat ordinary, but the N.O. atmosphere adds a lot. I'll probably read Jass and Chasing the Devil's Tail, Fulmer's earlier St. Cyr books.

Don't know that I agree with that. I know a fair number of young people who have as much or more money as I had when I was in college in in my early 20's. Most of them choose to spend their money on things other than music - probably because they can get music for free. Don't know if it's so, but I feel that something that doesn't cost anything means less to people than something they have to pay for. Perhaps that's at least part of the reason that music doesn't seem to be as important to young people today as it was in the past.