I’ll be playing an Obama fundraiser at 6 on Sunday:
3860 Tracy Street @ St. George in the Franklin Hills/Los Feliz/Silverlake area, 90027. We have a big garden that is good for performance. We’ll also have bingo, barbeque, beer and hopefully babes for Obama.
The thing starts at 4 and officially stops [...]
“Blues” broke with the publication of W. C. Handy’s seminal compositions “Memphis Blues” in 1912 and then “St. Louis Blues” in 1914. At that time the recording industry existed but was still subdominant to the sheet music industry. Between 1917 and 1923 their roles reversed, and both of these stayed popular in the [...]
19th century American culture had endless layers of social protocol. They used personal titles in family life: “Professor Cunningham, please pass the salt.” They used multiple initials in their full names: “W. E. B. DuBois”, or “D. E. Jannon.” They used elaborate circumlocutions, like saying “prestidigitation” instead of “magic trick.”
Manners [...]
On Friday 8/29 I’ll play at Arnie’s cafe in Tujunga with my friends David Orser, Scott Boyd, and Fred the drummer. This will be a slacker jam of old time music. I imagine the highlight will be David’s ragtime piano playing, which is amazing.
I’ll do a solo show at an Obama fundraiser on [...]
I made a couple improvements to the sheet music for Kristen Hersh’s song “Elizabeth June”: I fixed a typo where I named a chord G rather than F, and I added chord fingering diagrams.
For what it’s worth, the reason why I’m posting this modern music on this blog is that it’s a case of [...]
From the sheet music for a 1919 song, shortly after the first hit jazz record and not long before the collapse of the sheet music business for the duration of the 20th century:
Searching for public domain sheet music is a drag because the results are always dominated by commercial providers who stink. So I created this custom search engine to limit the search results to sites in the “Sheet Music Sources” list in the right side of this page.
[...]
This is my transcription of Kristen Hersh’s song Elizabeth June. This is a lead sheet with the chords, melody, and lyrics together. I don’t have a good transcription of the guitar picking patterns.
I got to know this song well by transcribing it, which is a [...]
I have posted a bunch of new versions of Frog in the Well over in its song page. There is a five-second MP3 to use as a ringtone. There are 20, 30, and 40 second cuts for use as a cue in a video. And over on CC Mixter there is a [...]
The sheet music collection at Mississippi State is a fine archive that I haven’t come across before. Something notable about them is that they publish the music as PDFs rather than images embedded in web pages. Although it’s a bit annoying to not be able to browse the pages, it’s really nice to [...]
I have created a little utility to help people who don’t have Sibelius change the key of a Sibelius file using the Scorch plugin. I give you:
The Scorch-O-Matic
Blind Blake — He’s in the Jailhouse Now (MP3)
I put together a lead sheet of the 1920s classic “He’s in the Jailhouse Now” because I needed it to rehearse a biggish band, and there’s no reason to keep it to myself.
According to Roosevelt’s Blues, the song has been traced back to at least 1917, but [...]
The following MP3s a very dirty jokes from the 1890s on a wax cylinder recording, via the incredible Archeophone release Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s:
Obscene Recordings from 110 Years Ago
The commercial recordings on this CD are the only known copies that Comstock’s men missed. They were preserved by long-time Edison Recording [...]