sweartotellthetruth

September 30, 2013

Blues and Rhythm Show 99 on 93.3 CFMU (Hamilton, Ontario)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — cmcompton @ 5:36 am

Swear to Tell the Truth for Tuesday, October 1st, 2013 (1:00-2:30 pm)

R&B vocal groups are mostly to be found in the Soul Discography rather than the Blues Discography (both available from Eyeball Productions of Vancouver) but they’re probably better understood in relation to the blues tradition than soul, which is really a phenomenon of the sixties. African-American vocal group music covered a wide spectrum of styles from the forties onward. There were groups who sang mostly popular songs, groups that straddled the worlds of gospel and R&B and groups rooted in the blues. In the 1940s, a number of groups brought the excitement and fervour of the church to secular material even before Roy Brown or Ray Charles. We’re not going to try to closely document the evolution of R&B vocal groups this week but we’ll present a brief survey of the blues side of vocal group sounds. The great blues writer Paul Oliver once wrote that blues were not suited to vocal group treatments. We think that he came to this conclusion because his definition of blues was too narrow.

Also on the program a very brief look at the early days of Modern Records of Los Angeles. It will be a prelude to a special feature on the Modern label we plan to bring to air some time in the next few months. From Hadda Brooks to Roy Hawkins to B.B. King to Etta James, Modern was among the handful of great and enduring labels in blues and R&B.  

On the Show:

Hadda Brooks Trio – Gene Phillips –  Amos Garrett – Mississippi John Hurt – Big Three Trio – Ravens – Midnighters – Richard Berry – John Ellison – Ike & Tina Turner

Listen to the program at FM 93.3 in Hamilton or on CFMU online at cfmu.mcmaster.ca. The program will be available to stream or as a podcast until October 29th.

Contact Us

To reach us with comments or queries, write us at sweartotellthetruth@gmail.com.

You can also follow the program at sweartotellthetruth@nosignifying on Twitter.

Next week (October 8th)

Our 100th show.

Upcoming programs

It’s a new season and we’re working on some rough ideas for programming themes for The Blues & Rhythm Show in the coming months. We’ll list some of them on this blogsite soon–but not this week. 

cmc

 

September 23, 2013

Blues and Rhythm Show 98 on 93.3 CFMU (Hamilton, Ontario)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — cmcompton @ 4:18 am

Swear to Tell the Truth for Tuesday, September 24th, 2013 (1:00-2:30 pm)

Most of this program will feature music emanating from –. Not that we planned a special on Chicago. It just worked out that way.

Chicago was home to a distinctive style of blues in the fifties and beyond. Mention Chicago blues and people have an idea of what you are talking about. After World War 2, independent record companies sprang up in Chicago to exploit local talent and markets. Miracle, Aristocrat-Chess, Parkway, Chance, VeeJay, United/States, USA were among the labels recording blues and gospel in the city. This evolution of local labels and studios supporting local music continued through the sixties with the rise of soul music and Chicago represented its distinctive soul styles on both locally based and on national labels. OKeh and Brunswick each operated from Chicago offices for a period of time. In the end, both blues and soul were eclipsed by disco and, later, hip-hop but not before the labels that recorded and marketed the music disappeared one by one or were the object of corporate takeovers, like GRT Corporation’s purchase of Chess and the move of Chess company headquarters to Los Angeles. 

All of the above is background to the music which was created by waves of African-American migrants to Chicago as well as and in combination with native born Chicagoans like Billy Boy Arnold. And even after the labels folded or were bought out, artists like Syl johnson and Tyrone Davis continued to perform for local audiences while new generations of performers have emerged to carry on and renew the blues and soul traditions of the city in a changing demographic. As national trends shifted away from blues and soul, Chicago still had the critical mass of support to sustain some kind of local scene.

Included on the program, once more, will be three of the headliners of the Blues Explosion show, scheduled for this coming Friday, September 27th, at Hamilton Place.

On the Show:

L.C. McKinley – Howlin’ Wolf –  Mighty Joe Young – Johnny B. Moore – Ricky Allen – Erma Franklin – Lucy Smith – Staple Singers – Norfleet Brothers – and others

Listen to the program at FM 93.3 in Hamilton or on CFMU online at cfmu.mcmaster.ca. The program will be available to stream or as a podcast until October 22nd.

Contact Us

To reach us with comments or queries, write us at sweartotellthetruth@gmail.com.

You can also follow the program at sweartotellthetruth@nosignifying on Twitter.

Next week (October 1st)

We don’t have a plan yet for next week’s show. We might include some R&B vocal groups.

Upcoming programs

It’s a new season and we’re working on some rough ideas for programming themes for The Blues & Rhythm Show in the coming months. We’ll list some of them on this blogsite soon.

cmc

 

September 16, 2013

Blues and Rhythm Show 97 on 93.3 CFMU (Hamilton, Ontario)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , — cmcompton @ 1:10 am

Swear to Tell the Truth for Tuesday, September 17th, 2013 (1:00-2:30 pm)

Just a brief outline for you today. This week we’ll be looking at the headliners from the Blues Explosion scheduled for September 27th at Hamilton Place. We’ll also be be picking up on a few themes we’ve talked about on recent shows, about early blues, on the one hand, and early blues recordings, on the other.  We won’t have time to get very far into it this week but we may take a longer look soon on a future program.

We’ll just note for the moment the difficulty of knowing exactly when songs originated. Some lyrics were recorded for the first time by theatre singers and appeared later in down home performances but where did the songs originate? Sometimes the lyrics were snatched from folk sources by professional songwriters, sometimes by the classic singers themselves. In other cases theatre singers and down home performers were possibly drawing from the same folk sources. And it’s easily forgotten that the marketplaces where songs and bits of songs were exchanged was likely to be a city, whether Kansas City, Nashville, or New Orleans–to name only the places that feature in this week’s program

On the Show:

Carolina Chocolate Drops – Henry Thomas (“Ragtime Texas”) –  Cleo Gibson – Mainline – Matt Murphy – Eddy Clearwater – Sugar Blue – Ted Hawkins

Listen to the program at FM 93.3 in Hamilton or on CFMU online at cfmu.mcmaster.ca. The program will be available to stream or as a podcast until October 15th.

Contact Us

To reach us with comments or queries, write us at sweartotellthetruth@gmail.com.

You can also follow the program at sweartotellthetruth@nosignifying on Twitter.

Next week (September 24th)

Nothing planned as yet but we’ll likely be looking at some gospel , perhaps a gospel feature

cmc

 

September 9, 2013

Blues and Rhythm Show 96 on 93.3 CFMU (Hamilton, Ontario)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — cmcompton @ 5:03 am

Swear to Tell the Truth for Tuesday, September 10th, 2013 (1:00-2:30 pm)

Well, we survived our live broadcast in the McMaster Student Centre and then, unaccountably, became quite ill for a few days, so we had to scramble to get a program together for this week, operating at a little less than optimum efficiency. What we’ve done is to revise a feature we did a year and a half ago on Savoy label R&B. If you happened to catch that early program, we’ve retained part of the playlist from the feature but changed several tracks. The non-feature portion will all be brand-new, including something new in The Walter Davis Project, new little Miss Higgins, Alvin Youngblood Hart–here on the 27th at Hamilton Place–and the Butanes Featuring Willie Walker. Also a track from the reissue CD, The Cry of the Wounded Jukebox. Anybody know whose CD that might be?

On the Show:

Walter Davis – Little Miss Higgins – Harrison Kennedy –  Hot Lips Page – Gatemouth Moore – Paul Williams – Helen Humes – Billy Wright – Brother Napoleon Brown – Bessie Griffin. Listen to the program at FM 93.3 in Hamilton or on CFMU online at cfmu.mcmaster.ca. The program will be available to stream or as a podcast until October 8th.

Contact Us

To reach us with comments or queries, write us at sweartotellthetruth@gmail.com.

You can also follow the program at sweartotellthetruth@nosignifying on Twitter.

Next week (September 17th)

We’ll be fortunate to get this program to air. No idea about next week as yet.

cmc

 
 

Blog at WordPress.com.