h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

..thank god we don't naturally think in binary
bookmarking the top of the next thread in case it all gets lethargic out here.

Moving over to the new pot of tea...
You're right about BB King. It was just hearing the song which sampled him this morning (I'm sure other stuff I've got samples him as well) from the depths of my mp3 collection (I do have a cd copy of the song as well ) that got me wondering.

While I was making up some CD samplers to send to MikeA, I re-discovered a CD of the Muddy Waters Tribute Band, a kind of all-star Chicago Blues scene thing of Muddy songs. If Mike didn't have any authentic blues stuff before, he will now.

The blues, begs the age old question, can a white man sing the blues?
or even as posed by Vivian Stanshall, Does a blue man sing the whites?

A while back I heard a great two part interview with BB King taling about how he'd worked his way up from a plantation, through Nashville, around the world and to owning a club in Nashville. Really good stuff.

I'd give anything to be able to breathe the whites, let alone sing. This has turned into a stonking cold.

I gotta mow lawn tonight, between the heat and the dark. Hey it's the weekend and a holiday. Wonder what's got control of Babel-17?

It's the weekend, it's a holiday, so you know what the weather's going to be like in the UK don't you. Yes it is chucking it down with rain and has been doing so for most of the day...

I saw Babel-17 around earlier at the dinner party Grebo's hosting.

About that crate - I intend to summon Locotr for the Grand Opening

White trash singing blues...when I was reading about The Yardbirds playing with some blues guy in my Clapton biography, it said how the dude was extremely bitchy towards them. I could just imagine him bawling at them, "Ok you white trash, we're gonna play Little Red Rooster, an' you fags gonna get it right!"

What about Quorthon, Kothaar and Va-Va-Vornth? Shouldn't you be thinking of them first?

Sounds about right. These gentlemen don't take no s**t on their own ground, not to put too fine a point on it.

It would be interesting, summoning the Swedish gods for their Swedish mosh pit. I think they'd be too busy with their Swedish lesbians though

The bio made a point about what that guy was feeling. Back in the 40s and 50s, these black guys had scraped a living by travelling around playing blues, living hand to mouth. And now in the 60s, there's a horde of white kids cashing in on their sound making easy bucks. No wonder he was so bitchy...

I don't want to sound patronising, but how are you defining the word lesbian here, Mike?

As for the Great White Rip-Off, Elvis started it. I think. Him and Jerry Lee Lewis. And wasn't Chuck Berry the first black man to break through in his own right, not counting the shoeshine doo-wop groups?

How am I defining lesbo? Well, girls who like girls, of course

And you're prolly right with that next bit as well...I'm, of course, not old enough to know for myself

I think Alan Freed, a DJ in Cleveland(?), was instrumental in raising the popularity of the sound. He started playing R&B music on a mainstream radio station.

Depends on what you mean by breakthrough, didn't Al Jolson have quite a good career as a singer

Elvis though was a southern boy who grew up with gospel and the blues as part of his life, so it would be natural that he'd go down those lines when he came to sing. Because of this I wouldn't say that Elvis started the great white blues rip-off.
I'd put it to the UK based people who copied what they heard, either blues or rock and roll as they have no real base in the musical history of the UK. Of course all these people put their own spin on things which is why the fellow mentioned above was peeved with Clapton and the Yardbirds.

And yet, all music rips something off. The first music ripped off sounds of nature (oo wa ga OOMF!) If something good comes out of the borrow -- and I think Yardbirds did qualify -- then it's cool.

Garius you e right about Elvis. That's the part where the white southerner turned out to be less race-prejudiced than the northerner (overlooking the Saturday night lynchings for the moment)...

Yeah, look at what the stuff the yardbirds and them bands mutated into...ROCK!

What I remember of the 50's -- I was in elementary school in the late 50's -- was that the Bill Haley-type stuff was really swing with a different hair-do, and it wasn't until the US got a sort of reverse injection from the UK thanks to the Beatles craze that blues-rock started to show up on the mainstream charts or in the style of musicians.

Has Mike A left for karate class? We may have to wait a couple of hours for the mosh pit gift opening, I think.

Gratuitous 'stick head round door' sort of thing again i am afraid

Thass OK. You can give a full account of yourself later

What I remember of the 50's, nothing. I'm sure my parents would remember more though

Never really thought of swing as being the precurser to Bill Haley and that stuff, but it makes sense.

I'm currently listening to some very good UK blues, with slightly less of the rock side to it. It's by a band called Gomez and they won the best Technics/Mecury music prize for the best album of a couple of years ago for their debut album, Bring It On. The prize was presented to them by John Lee Hooker and they were quite astounded that he did the presentation. That's a recomendation and a half! The thing is if you listened to them (and for quite some time I didn't know) you wouldn't think they were in their early to mid twenties.

Gomez, huh? Debut album?

This raises a lot of questions, doesn't it, about what it takes, experience-wise, to "understand" the blues.