Free Music Friday: Blue Boy Orlis & The Stompers: Same Old Man

Hi Folks

Since the recordings from the last two weeks were from Orlis' archive, I decided to put up some of his music this week. This is called Same Old Man, and it's the song I always want to use when I introduce the Stompers to people. it was the the first song we recorded when we set up the four track at the Peace & Justice Center in 1993. It was January of 1993 in fact, and listening to it I'm remembering doing alot of playing and recording in that building with only a little wood stove for heat. Anyway, here's the track:



And, you can take one home, here. Creative Commons license, you can have it, just don't sell it.

Credits: Orlis: vocals and guitar. Levi Williams: bass, mouth harp, vocal. Mark Mcgee: harmonica, sandpaper blocks. Chris Moody: banjo, saw. Eric (who usually played bass) vocal. Brian Petty: vocal. Cori Teeple: vocal. Stomper engineered by Lvi, Chris and Eric.

let me know what you think!

Free Music Friday: Kiwi at the Library Club, I Am the Walrus

Kiwi, at the Library Club 1981. The song is a full-on, over the top cover of "I am The Walrus" by two (three?) musicians, an excerpt from a sociomusical relic, a cassette recording called Kiwi's Last Stand. Lead singer Tommy Elskes is still playing in Texas (*update, no, the google is telling me something about Colorado and now New Orleans...) He's put out a couple of albums and there are videos on Youtube to be found. I think that Kiwi was from Texas and moved up to Fayetteville, or played in Fayetteville alot in the 1970s. Beyond that I don't know much and would be grateful to hear more in comments.




* note this recording is also thanks to Orlis! Download link at here.

Keeping the Zebra Ranch Going.

I was searching out blog remembrances of Jim Dickinson, when I came across this. It's from Mary Lindsay Dickinson via Robert Gordon via Paul Duane via Joe Nick Patoski:

"People have been asking me what they could do to help us. I didn't know what to say until yesterday when I woke up with Jim's voice in my head, saying as he often did, "I am never insulted by money." This fits into Cody and Luther's plan for the Zebra Ranch Studio, which is to continue to record there with the benefit of Jim's sonic genius and musical ambiance.

If people want to participate in keeping Jim Dickinson's dream alive, they can donate to friendsofjimdickinson@gmail.com through paypal or mail to
Mary Dickinson
P.O. Box 1015
Coldwater, MS 38618

Please help us spread the word that the Zebra Ranch studio is always open
for business, either as a rental or with the addition of Cody as producer,
Luther as guitarist and aesthetic consultant,and Jim smiling down on us from Heaven."

If you know anywhere this information should be posted, post it. World Boogie is Coming.



Damn right it's coming. And, I'll have that other post up soon--Jim generated some amazing memorials, befitting the work that he did.

The Band is...

Discuss.

RIP Levi Stubbs

We're saying goodbye to a powerful, unique voice. As I recall, the Motown staff had trouble finding songs for the Four Tops because Levi Stubbs' voice was in a lower range than most of their lead singers. Well, they found one, and this was it:



and then this one:



there's more, go find 'em yourself.

"a social history of remembering in the South."

Sorry for the long absence from this site. There's plenty on my mind, but no particular thing floating to the top that I want to blog about. so, instead, I want to share something that I read (again) today that's driving what I'm hoping to do:

“We should not take for granted, then, the inevitability of the contemporary southern landscape, dense with invocations of the past. The historical South that exists today is the consequence not of some innate regional properties but of decades of investment, labor, and conscious design by individuals and groups of individuals who have imagined themselves as “southerners.” If characterizations of southern memory are to be meaningful, attention should be given to what kind of history southerners have valued, what in their past they have chosen to remember and forget, how they have disseminated the past they recalled, and to what uses those memories have been put. We need, in short, a social history of remembering in the South.”

W. Fitzhugh Brundage, from No Deed But Memory” in Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory and Southern Identity, 2000.

To this I'd add the commonsense note that different southerners have valued different memories, and used different mechanisms for archiving and disseminating those memories too. some of that memory work corresponds to dominant hegemonic notions of southerness, and some of that memory work defies those notions, sometimes activating and enlisting contrary and alternative imaginations of southerness in that effort. And while even this could stand a little unpacking, I want to press forward and suggest a couple of unusual sites for archiving and activating memory, sites available to groups who who lack (for a variety of reasons) the political clout to write their past into the literal landscape in the form of either shopping malls or graveyards. One of them is Facebook, where my own hometown has been holding a kind of extended and far flung countercultural reunion. The other one, broader and more directly applicable to my project is live music in general.

My own experience in playing at and putting on shows suggests to me that live musical performance is all or mostly or often about the construction of memorable moments, and that popular musical performance specifically is about the ongoing practice of enacting (constructing, whatever performative verb you want to use here) a (roughly) duplicable series of memorable moments. Looking at live musical performance in this way ties those performances to recordings, ties together the interests of musicians and audiences, and helps, I hope to get at the role that social musicking plays in the (re)construction of the past in the present. In the context of Brundage's remarks on southern memory it also allows us to see southern musicking as an ongoing identificatory project.

Now, there's a cluster of thoughts around "southern music" and especially "southern rock" that I think cries out for some expansion, but I need a cup of coffee to think about that. Specifically, I'm thinking about southern music, genre, and memory as the overall theme of the next post.