sweartotellthetruth

October 20, 2015

Blues and Rhythm Show 201 on 93.3 CFMU (Hamilton, Ontario)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , — cmcompton @ 3:50 am

Swear to Tell the Truth for Tuesday, October 20th, (1:00-2:30 pm).

It’s election day in Canuckistan. Not a lot of time on election night to put this blogpost together of the program itself, for that matter.  At the heart of the program this week, a brief and not entirely representative survey of Roosevelt Sykes‘ recording career.  The Southern Piano Ace was a star of the 1929-1942 era of blues and still an important name in blues and R&B in the post-war era, known as “The Honeydripper” after his 1936 recording with that title. He was also part of the Blues Revival (We don’t like the term but we don’t have a better one) of the 1960s and later. No piano player in the blues made more commercial singles.  He also contributed some memorable songs to the blues songbook including “Driving Wheel” and “The Night Time Is the Right Time”.  He worked solo and in duos, trios and quartets in the thirties, then adapted his style to approximate what the R&B jump combos were doing in the post-war era.  On this program we’re touching on a few points in Sykes’ career and we are likely underemphasizing his early recordings from the period when he was most popular but we’ll return to that period in a future program. Sykes could fairly have expected more recognition in the later years and he possibly deserves more recognition even today when almost all of his early music is available.

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Also on this week’s program, a bit of African-American rock and roll, a pair of tracks collected by Art Rosenbaum, first recordings of a couple of songs whose origins interested us and some latter-day soul.

Image result for roosevelt sykes

On the Show: Eunice Davis – Willie Egan – Leon Bridges – Hokum Boys – Scrapper Blackwell – Lee Green – Roosevelt Sykes – Johnny Rawls & Otis Clay – et al.

Listen to the program at FM 93.3 in Hamilton or on CFMU online at cfmu.msumcmaster.ca. The program will be available to stream or as a podcast until November 16th.

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 27th)

TBA

cmc

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March 31, 2015

Blues and Rhythm Show 174 on 93.3 CFMU (Hamilton, Ontario)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — cmcompton @ 1:01 am

Swear to Tell the Truth for Tuesday, March 31st, (1:00-2:30 pm)

Our theme this week the origins of Robert Johnson. There’s a powerful mythology around the figure of Robert Johnson, way out of proportion to his contemporary importance when he was alive. We’ve never devoted much time to Robert Johnson’s music on The Blues & Rhythm Show, but this week we are looking at the sources of his songs, guided by Elijah Wald’s book Escaping the Delta and a CD compilation he edited for the Yazoo label, a CD titled Back to the Cross-Roads. A large part of the myth of Robert Johnson rests on the idea that his songs were not only unique but were an expression of his tormented psyche. Not given much consideration was the idea that Johnson was developing songs from models that were available to him from popular blues artists like Leroy Carr, Kokomo Arnold or Lonnie Johnson, something which Wald demonstrated in considerable detail in his book. And, while Robert Johnson revealed certain preoccupations in his songwriting, they were not in any way outside of blues convention As the title of Wald’s book suggests, Johnson’s ambitions were larger than the Delta region he emerged from and, while his music was an anticipation of the later Mississippi-in-Chicago blues and the beat of rock and roll, Wald wondered if his imagination might not have taken him in a quite different direction.

On the Show:

Michael Jerome Browne – Steve Earle – Johnnie Temple – Robert Johnson – Leroy Carr – Kokomo Arnold – Scrapper Blackwell – Rev. E.W. Clayborn, The Guitar Evangelist – Tampa Red – Mississippi Sheiks – and others

Listen to the program at FM 93.3 in Hamilton or on CFMU online at cfmu.msu.mcmaster.ca. The program will be available to stream or as a podcast until April 27th.

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 (April 7th)

Can’t tell you right now.

April 15, 2014

Blues and Rhythm Show 127 on 93.3 CFMU (Hamilton, Ontario)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — cmcompton @ 1:18 pm

Swear to Tell the Truth for Tuesday, April 15, 2014 (1:00-2:30 pm)

This week’s program is about the years preceding the so-called “Blues Revival”. The term was based upon the idea that the blues had been lost and needed to be rediscovered or revived. The Blues Revival was about artists and styles from the past history of the blues. It was about Son House, Bessie Smith, and Bukka White, rather than contemporary stars like B.B. King, Bobby Bland and Junior Parker. Our first idea was to devote a single program to the phenomenon of the Blues Revival but we decided to expand our coverage to include the prehistory of the revival, starting in the 1930s. This week’s program tracks the changes in mainstream attention to and interest in the blues and we conclude that what the Blues Revival really describes is the new and rapidly expanding folk audience’s discovery of music most of America didn’t know anything about. The revival began with interest in the blues of the twenties and thirties and was partly inspired and given impetus by the 78 collector culture and interest in the artists who made the records twenty to forty years earlier. Interest soon extended to classic Chicago blues, music only a decade past at the time. By the end of the sixties, writers like Paul Oliver had begun the task of writing the history of blues in close detail. 

A byproduct of the Blues Revival is the huge amount of research and study that has been devoted to this corner of American musical and cultural history since the sixties. Today’s program tracks the stages in mainstream America’s interest in and exposure to blues from the late 1930s to the late fifties and early sixties.

On the Show:

Leadbelly – Joe Turner – Sonny Terry – Pink Anderson – Furry Lewis – Scrapper Blackwell – Memphis Slim – Alberta Hunter – Dave Van Ronk – Reverend Robert Wilkins

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 May 12th.

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 (April 22nd)

Don’t yet have a plan but we’ll mix things up on next week’s program. Check the blogsite closer to the date.

cmc

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