Tag Archives: blues

Larkin Poe and Other Online Finds (But Mostly Larkin Poe)

Photo from Larkin Poe Instagram

Sometime during my first week of our pandemic lockdown I was mindlessly surfing through Facebook, as one does, when I came across two women playing and singing in a casual setting with minimal production value but pretty good audio quality. Larkin Poe. Name sounded familiar, but I don’t think I’d ever heard them play before. They were doing this cover version of a ZZ Top song that I’ve never really liked, so I moved on. Thirty seconds later I went back to watch them finish it. And then I watched it again.

Since March 12, I have listened to what seems like several thousand hours of music; watched Scandinavian television shows; sampled films from South Korea; did the Tiger King boogie in one sitting; started, stopped, and started again to binge Ozark; read three different books simultaneously; and have tried hard to play guitar at least an hour a day. I’ve risked my life for a dozen bagels and a bag of Oreos. Stood in line for over an hour to buy a dozen bottles of sparkling water and a carton of almond milk that did not feature the faces of any missing children on the side. Once, I repeatedly refreshed the Costco app on my iPhone over a 36-hour period without any sleep until it finally allowed me order a case of Bounty paper towels, which I patiently waited four weeks to receive. I’ve bought two black handmade face masks from a woman in Latvia named Veronika who posted them on Etsy, and she has sworn to me that they were sent to me over a month ago. And I believe her.

Have you ever heard of a band called Severe Tire Damage? Me neither. On June 24, 1993, they were the first band to perform live on the internet, beating out The Rolling Stones by a year. In 1995, RealNetworks streamed the first baseball game: the New York Yankees versus the Seattle Mariners. And in 1998 Dale Ficken and Lorrie Scarangella stood in a Pennsylvania church as the Rev. Jerry Falwell sat in his office in Lynchburg, Virginia, and officiated their wedding over the web. It wasn’t until 10 years later that YouTube hosted its first livestream and opened up a new media format for live music, sporting events, original programming, gaming, pornography, and things we’ve never imagined and are still evolving.

Two months after watching that first Larkin Poe livestream, which has since been viewed over one million times on Facebook, I am still enchanted by this sister duo. I’ve watched Megan Lovell play a duet with her musician husband, and watched her DIY slide guitar lessons. I have seen Rebecca Lovell’s kitchen and grabbed my guitar while she taught us a blues riff from one of their new songs. I’ve heard them cover Black Sabbath and sing a Bill Withers song when he passed, and they’ve talked about their new album, Self Made Man, that comes out June 12 and the worldwide tour that was planned and is obviously in pause mode.

It was only when I followed the trail to Larkin Poe’s Wikipedia page that I realized I had once known them as The Lovell Sisters, an acoustic roots band from Georgia that included their older sister Jessica, who performed together from 2005 through late 2009. I’d heard them on Prairie Home Companion and there’s a hard drive in my apartment that I’m pretty sure contains their two albums. As teenagers they were road warriors, touring in a minivan and playing up to 200 dates a year. When Jessica left the band, the other two formed Larkin Poe in 2010 and their music has since evolved into a hard-charging Southern blues, rock, and roots orientation.

Rebecca and Megan released several projects on their own and played as backing musicians on a number of tours with Elvis Costello, Conor Oberst, Keith Urban, Kristian Bush of Sugarland, and others. They were tapped by T Bone Burnett as players in the band for Lost On The River: The New Basement Tapes in 2014 and made their debut at the Glastonbury Festival that summer. Their fourth album, Venom & Faith, reached number one on the Billboard Blues Chart in November 2018 and received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Blues Album.

Each of the Larkin Poe videos above were originally streamed on Facebook and Instagram during the lockdown. Both sisters are social media savvy, and for years have built a loyal following around the world by letting their individual personalities shine through the screen and interacting in a very natural way. They have certainly brightened my two months at home, and it feels like I’ve made two new friends who have broken the fourth wall.

Now living in Nashville, the sisters say this is the longest period in 15 years that they have not been on the road. And it comes at a particularly important time in their career, with Self Made Man scheduled for release next month. If you head over to their website, you’ll find links to the weekly livestream concerts they’ll be doing in May and June, along with tour dates – fingers crossed – that follow.

This was originally published at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website, as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

King Cotton and The Mississippi Delta Blues

Photo by Carol Highsmith / Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division

Do you want to know the absolute, honest-to-god truth? I am laying down on my bed, my computer balanced on my thighs, trying to find a topic for this week’s column, and I’ve got no clue about what I’m going to write. All I have is a photograph of an abandoned car sitting on what used to be the Hopson Plantation, outside of Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta region of America, and a title I made up to go along with it. That’s how it goes sometimes.

I found this picture online at the Library of Congress, where I was just poking around for inspiration. Sometimes when you ain’t got one thing or another on your mind, it’s a good place to ramble and wander. This particular image is one of 100,000 that Carol McKinney Highsmith has donated, the product of a decades-long project photographing all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and her pictures are free for anyone to use.

In a CBS News story about her back in September 2013, she said, “Things are changing for the good and the bad, and so that it’s important to catch that. Now, do I know what will be important? No, I don’t. I’m clueless.” (Note: Like me.) “If people are using my images now, I want them to. But I’m not living for today, I’m really living for 100 years from now.”

You can read Carol’s description of her photograph on the Library of Congress site where the image is posted, or I’ll give it to you here:

“An old spread on which cotton was picked by black tenant farmers and mules, Hopson became one of the Old South’s first mechanized cotton farms in 1935. After the crops petered out and labor became scarce, the operation shut down for many years, but it was revived as a most unusual motel, the Shack Up Inn, in which guests sleep in some of the old farm cabins, gins, and these metal silos. Also on the grounds, the converted farm commissary is now a jazz club and bar, loaded with antique memorabilia from the region.”

Something tells me that should you be reading this column around the time I published it (March 2020), you probably ain’t all that busy. If you’re like me and a few million other people, you’re at home experiencing the coronavirus pandemic. Streaming movies on your television, listening to or making music, catching up on a book or two or three, helping the kids with their schoolwork, cleaning out that closet, painting, whistling, cooking, praying, and thinking. So consider this a gift: Carol Highsmith’s America is a treat to click on and visit.

Two hundred miles long and about 70 miles wide, the Mississippi Delta is actually an alluvial plain. It’s a flat piece of fertile land created by the sediment from the continuous flooding of the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. For over 200 years it has been an agricultural region, and the first plantations initially grew tobacco, sugar, and rice. After the cotton gin was invented in the late 18th century, short-staple “king cotton” became the premier crop throughout the Deep South, with over a million slaves forced to leave Africa and work the fields. After the Civil War, the area lured both black and white migrants to work the land as sharecroppers and tenants, and they were followed by the recruitment of Italian and Chinese laborers.

The Delta Blues came out of the poverty and discrimination experienced by blacks in the area. When mechanization came to the farms in the 1920s, the Great Migration to the Northeast and Midwest took place and the music went with it. “Milk Cow Blues” by Freddie Spruell, recorded in Chicago in June 1926, may or may not be the first of this style to be documented, and there were a lot of other “race records” released during the decade.

If you’re looking for some more information and resources, check out this list of books from Acoustic Guitar magazine as a starting point. A lesson plan for students titled “A Snapshot of Delta Blues” is available from PBS. To wrap this up, I’ll leave you with a few live performances. Hope you enjoyed this little ride with me, and together we just made somethin’ out of nothin’. I remain forever clueless. Stay safe.

This was originally published at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website, as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column.

Americana Lost and Found: 1940-1947

Film Reel Container

On April 14, 1891, a Chicago businessman named Mortimer Birdsul Mills was granted a patent for a major improvement in what was then called a coin-actuated vending apparatus. It gave consumers of cigars the opportunity to select which one of several brands housed inside of a machine that they wanted to purchase. Mills established the Mills Novelty Company, and over the next several decades manufactured slot machines for gambling and separate devices that dispensed chewing gum, hot coffee, and cooled Coca-Cola bottles. With Mills’ son and grandchildren running the business, in 1928 it added coin-operated radios, phonographs, and eventually jukeboxes to its offerings.

One of the coin-operated machines of particular interest delivered to the public a new music configuration called Soundies. These three-minute black-and-white musical films were produced between 1940 through 1947, shot on 35mm film stock, and then transferred to a more affordable 16mm loop that featured eight different performances. For 10 cents you would get to watch one at a time with no ability for selection, but hopefully you’d enjoy whatever clip was next up and keep feeding the dimes.

At least seven production facilities in New York, Hollywood, and Chicago produced Soundies, for which the performers recorded the songs in advance and then lip-synced for the film. The machines that played them were sold and marketed under various brand names — Hi-Boy, Troubadour, Dancemaster, Do-Re-Me, Swing King, Zephyr, Studio, Throne of Music, Empress, Constellation, and The Panoram.

The Mills Panaram

The Panoram, built with high quality wood and designed in an art deco motif, was placed in public areas such as soda shops, cafés, taverns, roadhouses, and bus and train stations. While the first year was a runaway success, bringing the Mills family millions of dollars, World War II quickly interrupted its distribution with a shortage of raw materials to build more cabinets. By 1947, with television in the beginning stage of home entertainment dominance, Mills discontinued the Panoram, leaving an archive of approximately 1,800 Soundies.

Merle Travis – “Old Chisolm Trail”

Covering all genres of music, such as classical, big-band swing, hillbilly novelties, and patriotic songs, Soundies also added comedy sketches in 1941. In American roots music you had Merle Travis, The Hoosier Hot Shots, many jazz bands, and what has become their legacy: a huge catalog of African American artists who would otherwise not have had the opportunity to be filmed. Eventually the Soundies were sold off to several home video companies and distributed in a variety of formats, with many currently available to view on YouTube.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe and The Lucky Millinder Orchestra – “The Lonesome Road”

In the mid-1960s, the Scopitone jukebox made its debut based on a similar technology as The Panoram but now offering color format. They were initially available in Western Europe but soon spread to the United States. Some of the performers included The Exciters, Procol Harum, Neil Sedaka, Jody Miller, Bobby Vee, and Nancy Sinatra’s popular “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” Bypassed by The Beatles and others from the British Invasion, the Scopitone jukebox faded by the late ’60s, although its technology continued for several years.

Lani McIntyre – “Imua Ailuni”

The Panoram and Scopitone systems each preceded and predicted the popularity of music videos popularized by MTV. Two recommended sources for more information about Soundies, the Panoram and Scopitone:

The Soundies Book: A Revised and Expanded Guide
The 2007 PBS-produced documentary Soundies: A Musical History, available on Amazon Prime Video

I’ll close this out with a cornucopia of clips, and encourage you to go forth and explore these three-minute slices of old-time historical Americana and American roots music.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music

Several months ago when I transitioned from an owner of music to a renter via streaming, the first selection I imported into my cloud-based digital library was a collection of folk music I first heard when I was just a little sprout. I was introduced to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music by an aunt who also taught me how to make chords and strum her guitar. She allowed me take her well-worn vinyl disc box set home, and for weeks I devoured this music. I couldn’t have been more than 11 or 12 years old, and along with having an older sister who endlessly played Joan Baez’s early albums as often as she’d listen to doo wop, rockabilly, and Elvis records, this early life genre convergence and musical immersion set my plate for life.

In the midst of reading a book about the life of Bill Monroe, I was recently reminded that both the Anthology and I will turn 66 this year. While much has been written about this compilation, it seems a good time to both rekindle the memories of older roots music fans and introduce this work to a younger generation.

Harry Smith was a man with diverse interests. He has been described as an experimental filmmaker, visual artist, mystic, bohemian, self-taught anthropologist, and collector of string figures, paper airplanes, Seminole textiles, Ukrainian Easter eggs, and out-of-print commercially released 78 RPM recordings from 1927 through 1935. After moving to New York in 1950, he found himself in need of money when his Guggenheim grant for an abstract film ran out, and he offered to sell his entire music collection to Moe Asch, the owner of Folkways Records. With the introduction of the long-playing album format, Asch instead encouraged Smith to create a compilation of these songs, and he provided him with office space and equipment. What resulted were three two-disc sets titled Ballads, Social Music, and Songs.

In 2014, author Amanda Petrusich published her book Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records and devoted an entire chapter to the Anthology, which was reprinted and is still viewable online at Pitchfork. It is easily the finest and most interesting account of Smith’s assembly of songs, and I love this particular description:

“Previously, these tracks were islands, isolated platters of shellac that existed independently of anything else: even flipping over a 78 required disruptive action. Shifting the medium from the one-song-per-side 78 to the long-playing vinyl album allowed, finally, for songs to be juxtaposed in deliberate ways. It’s possible now, of course, to dump all eighty-four tracks onto one digital playlist and experience the entire Anthology uninterrupted, but I still prefer to acknowledge the demarcations between its three sections — to play it as Smith did.”

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the benefactor and guardian of Moe Asch’s wonderful record label, re-released the Anthology on six compact discs in 1997, and all of the songs are available to listen to for free on their website. The box set includes a 96-page book featuring Smith’s original liner notes and various essays by writers, scholars, and musicians. Here are two brief excerpts:

“The Anthology was our bible … . We all knew every word of every song on it, including the ones we hated. They say that in the 19th-century British Parliament, when a member would begin to quote a classical author in Latin, the entire House would rise in a body and finish the quote along with him. It was like that.” – Dave Van Ronk

“First hearing the Harry Smith Anthology of American FoIk Music is like discovering the secret script of so many familiar musical dramas. Many of these actually turn out to be cousins two or three times removed, some of whom were probably created in ignorance of these original riches. It also occurred to me that as we are listening at a greater distance in time to a man or woman singing of their fairly recent past of the 1880s, we are fortunate that someone collected these performances of such wildness, straightforward beauty, and humanity.” – Elvis Costello

The collection offers something for everyone – folk, blues, Cajun, gospel, stringbands, Hawaiian and more – and is less historic and more the progenitor of modern day mix-tapes and curated playlists. Inspirational and influential, if you’re looking for the starting gate of both yesterday’s traditional old-time roots music and today’s popular Americana-branded genre, this is it.

Postscript: Producer Hal Willner paid tribute to the Anthology with a revisionist version called The Harry Smith Project, which included a two-CD set and DVD that were culled from a series of concerts in London, New York, and Los Angeles in 1999 and 2001. Featuring a wide variety of musicians from Steve Earle to Lou Reed, Sonic Youth to The McGarrigle Sisters, it is a loving interpretation that you may have missed. Here’s a taste with Richard Thompson, Eliza Carthy, and Garth Hudson covering Clarence Ashby’s “The Coo Coo Bird.”

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

80 Years of Sittin’ on Top of the World

Whether it’s listed on the record label as Sittin’ or Sitting, this 1930 country blues number has become an American standard over the years, which was acknowledged in 2008 when it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Although written by Walter Vinson and Lonnie Chatmon, and often credited to others, in typical folk music tradition it can originally be traced back to an instrumental a year prior from Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell. Under the title of “You Got To Reap What You Sow,” it was recorded and released in 1929 by Tampa Red.

A year later The Mississippi Sheiks added lyrics and changed the title to what we all know it as now. The band stayed together, rotating several members throughout the early 1930s in addition to the above-mentioned Walter and Lonnie, and they recorded over 70 songs for three different record labels. The Chatmon family came from Bolton, Mississippi, and after a five-year run they went back home to work on the farm.

Through the years a number of cover versions have been recorded in various styles, this one by Ray Charles, the first under his own name, and it was his seventh single for Swing Time Records. Note the song credits.

Whether it’s true or not, I’ve read that Bob Wills was such a fan of the blues that he once walked 50 miles to see Bessie Smith. This particular performance was recorded in September 1951 in Hollywood, California. Cotton Whittington is the man playing his guitar upside down and Bobby Koeffer is doing the non-pedal steel.

Back in his home state of Mississippi, Chester Burnette (aka Howlin’ Wolf) used to check out the old blues musicians, including the Chatmons. In 1957 he moved north and cut a pure blues version, changing the beat and electrifying it Chicago-style. At about the same time, Bill Monroe turned the song upside down and inside out with this smokin’ bluegrass version. Note the mistake on the label: it confuses the song title and composers with that other song made famous by Al Jolson.

In the ’60s the song probably received its most exposure from both the Grateful Dead’s debut album and Cream’s Wheels of Fire, with Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker. But it’s the Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley version that I have always been most enamored of. Paste magazine called their collaborations “classic old-timey folk music and blues that remains a primary inspiration to Americana roots musicians” and said “they possessed a unique musical chemistry that defied generational limitations and remains vital and fresh to the present day.”

In August of 1978, folklorist Alan Lomax, along with John Bishop and Worth Long, visited Sam Chatmon’s home in Hollandale, Mississippi, to record this version, 48 years after his family brought it to life. The list of people who’ve recorded it over the decades cover a large swath of styles, from Bob Dylan to Willie Nelson, Richard Shindell to James Blood Ulmer.

For those interested in a bit more historical information, I’d like to suggest that you check out this transcription from NPR’s All Things Considered. This is an interview with musicologist Bruce Nemerov from 2006 that walks you through the decades, similar to what I’ve done here, but with more detail.

I’m going to close this out with a version I really like from the late Pinetop Perkins. This was his final studio recording, done a year before he passed in 2010, and the vocals are delivered by Emily Gimble. From Tampa to Pinetop, and most recently Jack White, this song goes on forever.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.