gurdonark’s walk in the park video has a chimpy charm. The music is my Ella Waltz recording.

By email he commented: I left in too many of those transitions, which are every bit as amusing and clunky as Windows Movie Maker transitions. I’d take them out if I were doing it again. Overall, I pronounced Pinnacle VideoSpin a worthy successor.

Prince Albert Hunt was a pioneer of western swing. His fiddling had a ferocious groove. It was just outrageously swinging and hot.

Here’s a 30 minute super-8 documentary about him from 1974:

Warning: there are some flashes of racism in the blunt old school style.

The link above goes to a full length version. This embedded version is a trailer:

I found this film and these people had charm.

Working from this history of the song Maiden’s Prayer on Wikipedia…

1856

Sentimental salon tosh original, published as “Modlitwa dziewicy” in 1856 in Warsaw, Poland

A medium difficulty short piano piece for intermediate pianists. Some have liked it for its charming and romantic melody: others have described it as “sentimental salon tosh.” The pianist and academic Arthur Loesser described it as “this dowdy product of ineptitude.”

1935

That sounds almost nothing like the Bob Wills version, published in 1935, via YouTube

The American musician Bob Wills arranged the piece in the Western swing style and wrote lyrics for it. He published it first in 1935 as “Maiden’s Prayer”; later, it became a standard, recorded by many artists.

2009

Mike Auldridge casual jam on it.

74 years after the Bob Wills version it keeps just the chord progression and a few fragments of the melody.

Juneberry78s makes and sells their own MP3s of 78s. It’s an amazing resource for old time music.

There are free samples galore. I’ve been lost in their MP3s of cajun 78s for days.

Here is Uncle Bob Larkan and Uncle Sam McRee, Sr., with the boys and girls that go to make up the happy groups of “Arkansans” that so many hear and enjoy. Typical old southern melodies and old fashioned tunes make up their efforts to please you.

Via Juneberry 78s blog

A couple Sacred Harp tunes.

Sacred Harp 457 Wayfaring Stranger

Sacred Harp 276: Bridgewater

Horace Weston’s approach to harmony was bold and advanced.

In his composition “Egyptian Fandango” (sheet music here) there is an E7 spelled f#-g#-d-e, putting two whole-tone pairs next to each other to maximize dissonance:

Something really unusual there is the f#, the 9th of the chord, as the bass note. Modern jazz might do that to give a sense of two chords at once, meaning an E7 chord and an F# chord happening at the same time. But the way this is voiced with the 9th right next to the 3rd makes the f# act more like a coloration than a tonal center. Funk would have a 9th but only if the 3rd and root are in other octaves, far away from one another to prevent dissonance, and anyway the 9th would never be used as the lowest note. It’s a quirky and creative touch on Weston’s part.

Another approach to this voicing from the same song, this time staggering the high note to be on the downbeat, putting the rest of the notes together on the upbeat, and adding the 5th of the chord in the root:

This is again a personal and creative concept. The phrase here is the classic oom-pah boom-chuck 1-2 bass-chord chop, but the first note is above the entire chord rather than below it. If that e note before the chord were an octave down, it would be the same old same old. Weston had ideas.

Here’s the entire bar where that chord is sitting:

Phrase A from Egyptian Fandango by lucas_gonze

And here’s the overall phrase containing that bar, to help you situate this with respect to the beat:

Here is a video performance of the song as a whole:

A similar harmony to the above is in Weston’s composition “Horace Weston’s Celebrated Polka” (view sheet music at the Library of Congress). In the B section the main idea is a closely voiced V7 chord, with the 5th, the b7 and root note right on top of each other in a strongly accented chop:

Some cool things about this version of “John Henry” by the Blind James Campbell String Band:

- The fiddler rocks.

- The tuba player sounds great in a string band. How come you don’t hear more tuba in string bands?

- The dancing about a minute in.

gurdonark ran across the true history of a pair of star crossed lovers from the olden days. He seems to have gotten hooked on their life stories and cyber stalked them, digging up any details he can find on the internet. It’s a sad tale of an ordinary breakup between two ordinary people, a long time ago.

“Strike the chords of Life’s great autoharp whenever you may, and there comes forth the wails of misery and woe commingling with those of laughter and song”
[letter of Lucy Roberson to Ollie Roberson, from the Nevada Supreme Court case of Roberson v. Roberson, 41 Nev. 276, 169 P. 333(1917)]

I can’t tell you the parts of their relationship which involved roses and love poems and promises in the dark. I can tell you they were minors when they married. I can tell you that their relations crossed the expected boundaries of intimacy, such that Lucy bore at least one child. I can also tell you that the marriage did not work.

The couple talked it over, and decided to go their separate ways. Ollie moved from the piedmont of North Carolina to Reno, Nevada. Lucy moved in with her people, along with the couple’s child.

Read the rest on gurdonark’s blog.

Sittin´ On Top Of The World – Otha Turner & Corey Harris

The lyrics are coming from the Mississippi Sheiks version of the song, the original and very first. This song became a bluegrass, blues and folk standard over the decades. There might be some significance to the fact that the Sheiks were black and their version predated the many countryish versions by whites. For example, Turner might identify with the Sheiks more than with Bill Monroe.

The way the slide and quills work together is great.

Update later: it seems most likely to me that it’s Otha Turner’s *age* causing him to use the original Mississippi Sheiks lyrics. It took a while for this song to spin off all the related versions, and in the meantime it was a great song just as it was. The original came out around 1930. Turner was born in 1907, so was around 23 when the Sheiks were doing their thing. That would be a perfect age for him to learn the original just as it was.

Gurdonark tweeted:

Douglas Wolk theorizes the existence of “peak rock” a la “peak oil”:

For those who aren’t familiar with the problem, peak rock refers to the point in time where the maximum rate of production of global rock ‘n’ roll is reached, after which rock music enters a period of decline–you can map it out as a Hubbert curve. Rock ‘n’ roll was once considered to be a virtually limitless resource–what we call the Neil Young theory, that “rock and roll would never die”–but what we’ve been seeing in the past decade or so is that it’s actually non-renewable, and some experts now believe that peak rock may have been reached in the early ’90s or possibly even as early as the late 1970s. It’s not like all the rock is gone, but it takes more and more money and effort to extract large deposits of rock, and the remaining major labels have been forced to rely on diminishing reserves of fossil bands.

(Quoted from a 3-minute talk he gave at Experience Music Project earlier this year (about independent-label music in the ’00s)).

Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture excerpt (reblogged from BoingBoing):

The biggest myth of all is the Romantic notion that artists somehow create their work uniquely and from scratch, that paintings and sculptures and songs emerge fully-formed from their fertile minds like Athena sprang from Zeus. Running a close second is the myth that only a handful of us possess the raw talent – or the genius – to be an artist. According to this myth, the vast majority of us may be able to appreciate art to some degree, but we will never have what it takes to make it. The third myth is that an artist’s success (posthumous though it may be) is proof positive of his worthiness, that the marketplace for art and music functions as some kind of aesthetic meritocracy.

Of course, these myths fly in the face of our everyday experience. We know rationally that Picasso’s cubism looks a lot like Braque’s, and that Michael Jackson sounds a lot like James Brown at 45 RPM. We doodle and sing and dance our way through our days, improvising and embellishing the mundane aspects of our existence with countless unheralded acts of creativity. And we all know that American Idol and its ilk are total B.S. (very entertaining B.S., of course!). Each of us can number among our acquaintance wonderful singers, dancers, painters or writers whose creations rival or outstrip those of their famous counterparts, just as each of us knows at least one beauty who puts the faces on the covers of glossy magazines to shame.

Back in the olden days before recording, copyright was shorter and sloppier and musicians repurposed one another’s work aggressively.

The ability to swipe made songs better. A new song would take the best elements from source songs and add some parts of its own. Following songs would pick out themes and ideas from that new song. Over time all the songs in the lineage benefitted.

Wikipedia says:

Lead Belly was singing a version of the song from as early as 1908, which he claimed to have learned from his uncle Terell. An 1886 song by Gussie L. Davis has several lyrical and structural similarities to the latter song, however no information on its melody has survived. Some evidence suggests the 1886 song was itself based on an even earlier song which has not survived. Regardless of where he first heard it, however, by the 1930s Lead Belly had made the song his own, modifying the rhythm and rewriting most of the verses.