sweartotellthetruth

September 30, 2014

Blues and Rhythm Show 149 on 93.3 CFMU (Hamilton, Ontario)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — cmcompton @ 2:37 pm

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

This week we continue our survey of rhythm and blues, begun last week, through the years 1947 and 1948. Commercial recording was interrupted by the second American Federation of Musicians strike, the second so-called “Petrillo Ban”, which lasted most of 1948. For that reason, most of what was released by the record companies in 1948 was recorded in late 1947 and stockpiled for later release. 1947 saw the emergence of new down-home blues performers, including Muddy Waters, Smokey Hogg and Lightnin’ Hopkins on independent labels as Columbia and Victor carried on with limited blues recording based in Chicago and diminishing rosters. That’s not our focus on this week’s show. Mostly, the record companies continue to concentrate their resources upon the new urban-based music, “jump” R&B combos, with musicians versed in playing jazz and  that’s the music that we are featuring in this three-week series of programs.

On the Show:

Todd Rhodes & His Orchestra – Albert Ammons – Hadda Brooks – Gene Phillips – Nellie Lutcher – Bull Moose Jackson – Jimmy Witherspoon – Wild Bill Moore – Louis Jordan = Roy Milton – Dixieaires

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 28th.

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 7th)

Our survey of R&B continues through the music’s great year, 1949.

Errors and Omissions

Two weeks ago we played a version of the song “Today I Started Loving Your Again” by Bettye Swann. We anoounced that it was a George Jones song.  Of course, it was not.It was written by Merle Haggard.

cmc

 

September 28, 2014

Blues and Rhythm Show 148 on 93.3 CFMU (Hamilton, Ontario)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — cmcompton @ 5:29 pm

 

Swear to Tell the Truth for Tuesday, September 23rd, (1:00-2:30 pm)

Last week’s program began as what was intended to be a representative survey of rhythm & blues from the beginning to about the mid-fifties. The i.d. “rhythm & blues” has been misapplied over the decades and we’re sure there are people who aren’t sure exactly what we are referring to when we use the term. The idea was for last week’s program to let the playlist describe the scope of classic rhythm & blues. “Rhythm & Blues” is first an industry term, used for marketing purposes, but it aptly captures the phenomenon of blues music blended with elements of jazz. Of course, it was used as a blanket term to describe all the records on the African-American charts, formerly known as “race” or, later, as “sepia”. The best-seller chart was known for a while as the Harlem Hit Parade. Thus the term embraced popular jazz records, down-home blues and popular ballads sold to African Americans, as documented by the industry publication, Billboard Magazine. The term was invented by Jerry Wexler while he was a writer for Billboard and applied retroactively to records issued in the post-World war 2 era and to a few records issued in the war years.

When we assembled the program, we wound up taking a different track from the one we had started with. We wound up concentrating on the early years of R&B, starting with a few records from the war era and proceeding barely into 1947. We’ll resume this survey with next week’s program, taking us further into the R&B era.

On the Show:

Lucky Millinder & His Orchestra – Cecil Gant – Erskine Hawkins – Joe Turner – Gatemouth Moore – Helen Humes – Roy Milton – Wynonie Harris – Julia Lee – Amos Milburn

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 21st..

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 30th)

We continue into the late 1940s with our R&B survey.

cmc

September 15, 2014

Blues and Rhythm Show 147 on 93.3 CFMU (Hamilton, Ontario)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — cmcompton @ 11:32 pm

Swear to Tell the Truth for Tuesday, September 16th, (1:00-2:30 pm)

This will be one of gap-filling programs, a show where we tie up some loose ends arising from some recent programs we have aired. Some gospel, some blues and some soul on the show this week.

We follow up on a thread we mentioned last week in our special on 78 collectors and the records they value most highly. Specifically, we look at the duo of Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas in response to an article published earlier this year by John Jeremiah Sullivan in the New York Times Magazine, an article which sheds considerable light on a pair of artists who have been the subject of much speculation and theorizing. We also fill out the picture of pre-war blues in Alabama from a show three weeks ago with some examples of Birmingham piano.We close the program with a selection of soul recordings, most of them recorded at Fame Studio in Muscle Shoals.

On the Show:

Viola James & congregation – Cat-Iron – Jewel Gospel Trio – Earl Hooker – Elvie Thomas – Barbecue Bob – Jabo Williams – Clarence Carter – Erma Franklin – Candi Staton

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 14th.

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 23rd)

No plan as yet, but we will likely feature some R&B.

cmc

September 9, 2014

Blues and Rhythm Show 146 on 93.3, CFMU-FM (Hamilton, Ontario)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — cmcompton @ 6:26 am

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

Amanda Petrusich recently published a book called Do Not Sell At Any Price: the Wild Obsessive Hunt For the World’s Rarest 78 RPM Records. Much of this book has to do with the search for early blues records. We have a playlist mostly based upon the particular records Petrusich selected to discuss in the book and we key on a few of the issues she raises about the role of 78 collectors in forming our understanding of the blues and making the world aware of early blues styles in the first place. We have a few points of disagreement with the author and some questions about emphasis but the book is an informative and balanced account of where blues 78 collecting began and where it led, although that part of the story in Petrusich’s account seems incomplete to us. In any case, we recommend the book to anyone interested in the story of how we came to appreciate and value a music that was a marginal part of the music industry, widely disrespected, if not ignored completely outside of a small community of followers. At the same time the book also deals with issues of the collector aesthetic that tended to set value on the rare and the obscure and disdained music that was broadly popular.

On the Show:

Clifford Hayes’ Louisville Stompers – Willie Brown – Skip James – Ma Rainey – Charley Patton – Geeshie Wiley – Rev. F. W. McGee – Long Cleve Reed & Papa Harvey Hull (The Down Home Boys) – Kelly Harrell – Amede Ardoin

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 7th.

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 16th)

We have absolutely no idea at this point.

Correction

The extra track which closed the program was by Jerron Paxton, not “Jerred” as we stated on air. He sometimes calls himself “Blind Boy” Paxton. The track we played came from an album called The Best of the Brooklyn Folk Festival, issued by Jalopy Records in 2014. We’re not aware of any other recordings besides the pair of live performances on this album.

cmc

September 6, 2014

Blues and Rhythm Show 145 on 93.3 CFMU (Hamilton, Ont

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — cmcompton @ 7:31 pm

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

A special program for Welcome Week at McMaster University.We were live in the atrium of the McMaster University Student Union. No theme, just a selection of blues, R&B, gospel and soul. As well, a couple of examples of the hybrid music known sometimes as soul-blues, music sustained by a loyal audience but which survives without much attention from the larger music industry or the blues media.

On the Show:

Smiley Lewis – Sam “Highpockets” Henderson – Eddie Kirkland – Ginger St. James & the Grinders – Joe Pullum – Little Smokey Smothers – Loving Sisters – Bettye Swann – Willie Clayton – Little Booker

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 7th.

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 9th)

A review program based upon Amanda Petrusich’s book Do Not Sell at Any Price, about the pursuit of the rarest 78 recordings and the influence that blues 78 collectors have had upon what we understand about early blues. The show will feature many fine recordings from the twenties and thirties.

cmc

Blues and Rhythm Show 144 on 93.3 CFMU (Hamilton, Ontario)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , — cmcompton @ 6:42 pm

Swear to Tell the Truth for Tuesday, August 26th (1:00-2:30 pm)

This week, a program devoted entirely to blues and quartet gospel from Alabama in the 1920s and 1930s. Generalizations about blues from Alabama are difficult. There is simply a dearth of information even about relatively well-known figures like Ed Bell (aka Barefoot Bill). Birmingham was a location visited by record companies as early as 1927 and as late as 1937 but without really reflecting the local blues scene in any depth and there isn’t much hard information about some recording artists believed to be from Alabama. Blues historians and album compilers tend to group recordings and performers regionally. Alabama was the state where a lot of a pre-blues music could be found in the 1930s and still in the 1940s and 1950s when researchers like Harold Courlander and Frederick Ramsay were active recording traditional performers. Indications are that there was a healthy blues scene in Birmingham, including boogie piano, but it isn’t well-represented in commercial records.

We can be more certain about gospel quartet. Birmingham and Bessemer, both in Jefferson County, were the home of a distinct quartet culture, especially in the 1920s and thirties. Mobile on the Gulf Coast also had a gospel scene. We offer a selection of quartet gospel mostly recorded between 1928 and 1932. Two of the quartets in this set recorded in the post-World War 2  era and our set does not include the Heavenly Gospel Singers, whose records were all made between 1935 and 1941.

The years 1930 to 1932 witnessed a shaking out of the record industry and most blues and gospel performers–like most country artists who recorded in the twenties—would not record again when the labels began to build back their catalogues. The first five quartets in our survey did not record after 1931.  The Famous Blue Jay Singers first recorded in 1932 but not again until 1947.

On the Show:

Tampa Red – Daddy Stovepipe – Bogus Ben Covington – Jaybird Coleman – Walter Roland – Mobile Strugglers – Mount Zion Baptist Quartet – Bessemer Sunset Four – Slim Duckett & Pig Norwood – Famous Blue Jay Singers of Birmingham – Jimmy Hughes

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 September 30th.

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 2nd)

Next week is Welcome Week at McMaster University. We will present a live show from the Atrium of the McMaster Student Centre. Blues, R&B, Gospel and Soul will all be represented in the mix.

cmc

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