sweartotellthetruth

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.