You smiled... you smiled...And then the spell was cast...

And here we are in heaven
'Cause you are mine at last.

Ladies and gentlemen, the one, the only, the incomparable...
Miss Etta James.

Stuff I like: Still Bill

Of all the rags to riches stories in show business history, there may be none as remarkable as Bill Withers'. He was born in a West Virginia coal mining company town called Slab Fork. He was a stammerer and it made him shy, reticent to speak. He joined the Navy and when he got out, he worked at an aircraft company, installing toilets on 747s. At the age of 32, he had never been on stage professionally when he decided to take some of his songs into a studio to make a demo tape.

Sussex Records heard his demo and signed him. Booker T. Jones produced his first album, which included the breakout hit Ain't No Sunshine and Withers' personal favorite, Grandma's Hands. His second album included the number one hit Lean On Me and the top ten song Use Me. As a songwriter, he returned to the top of the charts in 1981 with Just the Two of Us, a huge success for Grover Washington, Jr.

The documentary Still Bill takes a look at his life now. He's 70 and he's been away from the music business for a very long time. There's a famous quote from Elvis Presley after he left the Army and some female reporter asked him if things had gotten back to normal yet.

"Ma'am, when things get back to normal, I'll be driving a truck."

Elvis only drove a truck for a few months before he became crazy famous. He got a small taste of "normal life" when he was drafted and served two years. Bill Withers saw "normal adult life" for over a decade before the first single on his first album became a monster hit. He never completely trusted the music industry, but thankfully his is not a story of riches going up in a puff of smoke. After he quit in 1985, he didn't tour or make any attempts to record new music. Bill had had enough, thank you very much.



The movie does a great job of showing Bill's relationships with friends and family and with his gifts as a songwriter. I didn't know much of his music other than the big hits, and I was pleasantly surprised how much good stuff he wrote. On the extras on the DVD, the Swell Season are among the acts who were part of a Bill Withers tribute concert in New York City, and they play a song of his off of +'Justments called Stories. I had never heard it before, but it's hauntingly beautiful. I'm using the lyric from the bridge as my tagline right now, and I give you a link to Bill's original version, available on the You Tubes.

Matty Boy says check it out.

New music for old people: Raphael Saadiq

Raphael Saddiq is a veteran of the music business, getting his big break in Sheila E.'s band back in the 1980's when she toured with Prince, then founding his own bands Tony! Toni! Toné! and Lucy Pearl.

He released an album in 2002 called Instant Vintage, which describes his music pretty well. While the recording techniques may be modern, a lot of his songs would fit perfectly into the rotation of a soul music radio station in 1968.

The You Tubes are being fussy about embedding videos, so instead I offer a link to his new single Heart Attack, which has kind of a Sly Stone/James Brown vibe to it.

Matty Boy says check it out.

Looking to honor the dead, instead I pay tribute to the living.

Ferlin Husky died this week. I felt like I should know more about Ferlin Husky, and so like when Charlie Louvin died, I went to The You Tubes to look up the best work of Ferlin Husky.

I gotta say it. His name and his hairdo were better than his singing or his choices of songs. His biggest hit was Wings of a Dove. It's bad form to speak ill of the dead but... meh.

He did record Mountain of Love, which was written and originally recorded by Howard Dorman in 1960.



I love Mountain of Love, but if I was going to recommend one recording, it would be the Top Ten version from Johnny Rivers.

Let us now spare a thought for Johnny Rivers. He will likely never be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, though he deeply deserves it. Born John Ramistella in New York City but raised in Baton Rouge, young Johnny played in a trio with his dad and his uncle. The DJ Alan Freed recommended he find a less ethnic name and he became Johnny Rivers, the main river being the Mississippi, with a little help from the Hudson.

Rivers could record anything, from country stuff like Mountain of Love to covers of R&B like The Seventh Son by Willie Dixon and soul classics like The Four Tops' Baby I Need Your Loving and Smokey Robinson's Tracks of My Tears. He also made a big hit out of Secret Agent Man.



Here's Johnny Rivers' original stereo version of Mountain of Love. If you know enough music theory, you know this song's great strength is the use of the triplet. If you don't that much music theory, just get up and dance. It's got a helluva beat.




And if I'm going to give a salute to Johnny Rivers, it would be just dead wrong not to include his greatest hit, a song he wrote with Jerry Adler called The Poor Side of Town. They called his genre The Go-Go Sound, and while it's very poppy and lushly produced, Johnny had himself one hell of a lot of soul.

Best wishes to Johnny Rivers, his family and friends, from a fan.

Philip Glass and melody.

I saw the Ensemble Parallèle's production of Philip Glass' 1993 chamber opera Orphée at the Herbst Theater last weekend and I loved it. I got a comp ticket from my very generous blog buddy sfmike, the author of the Civic Center blog, who was also a supernumerary in the show, one of the spooky strongmen/clowns who move everything in the Underworld that is incapable of moving itself. He writes about the many rehearsals and the critical review, which you can read about through the links.

The show only played twice and I will be able to tell people years from now that I saw it. They will be positively envious or I will be silently judging them.

I struck up a conversation with a fellow audience member, a woman named Bonnie who was connected to the new wave/punk scene back in the day, so we had many common points of reference. She loved the production but said she wished Philip Glass was more melodic.

Allow me to retort with embedded videos from the You Tubes.



This is the movement entitled Some Are from Glass' Low symphony, based on side two of David Bowie's great album Low, produced by Brian Eno. Some might argue that this is melodic because the work of Bowie and Eno is melodic, and that argument has some merit.





There is yet another Philip Glass work from the early 1990s called Passages, a collaboration with Ravi Shankar. Shankar plays on nearly every piece, but Glass wrote half and Shankar half. This one by Glass, Ragas in a Minor Scale, is very melodic indeed. I actually have a large section of it running through my brain on heavy rotation right now, and I don't mind a bit.

Again, thanks to sfmike for the ticket to the show, and also for an impromptu Oscar party with a prediction competition that neither of us won, sad to say. Congratulations to Cindy, the winner.

Hats off to Larry

You can now buy Beatles music at the iTunes store. I got on my computer to see if there were any Beatles tunes I couldn't live without and... not so much. I have the song Slow Down stuck in my head, but I already have the Lovable Liverpool Lads performing this live from the Beatles at the BBC CD I bought many years ago.

Like many early Beatles tunes, this was a cover and a semi-obscure one at that. Johnny, musical pioneer and devil that he was, got a serious hankering for the music of Larry Williams, an artist who was signed to Specialty Records in New Orleans when their big star Little Richard gave up the devil's music to preach the Word of the Lord.

Larry never became the star Little Richard was, but he wrote a hell of a lot of good music that other artists covered, including Dizzy Miss Lizzyand Bad Boy, also covered the Beatles, Bony Maronie, recorded by The Who, Dr. Feelgood and Johnny Winter, and She Said Yeah, recorded by the Rolling Stones.

Larry lived a short and turbulent life, plagued by drugs and violence. Wikipedia calls him a life long friend of Little Richard, but it also says he pulled a gun on the Reverend Penniman over a debt involving narcotics. After he died in 1980 at the age of 44, a drummer from southern Illinois named Martin Albritton started billing himself as Larry Williams and touring under his name. He has been confronted by several people who knew the real Larry Williams, including Etta James, and Williams' family has a court order demanding he cease and desist. So far, all this pressure has come to naught.




Without further ado, here is The Man Himself with the original recording of Slow Down by Larry Williams and his band from 1958.

Buffalo Skinners, performed by Raphael Boguslav

The third video on my YouTube channel is from an album released in 1956. Raphael Boguslav sang and played guitar, mandolin and banjo on the album Songs From A Village Garret, the village, of course, being Greenwich Village. He recorded a set of folk songs, some from the British Isles and others from the United States. Buffalo Skinners is a 19th Century American folk song, recorded most famously by Woody Guthrie.

There is no trace of Raphael Boguslav's music on the Internet, so I'm going to put some of his songs up on my YouTube channel. I will also share them here when I finish them. Special thanks to Peregrin who had the software that could change my old fashioned .mpg file to the newer style that iMovie can read.



Let me know what you think.

A disappointing setback.

When I was a lad, we had the album pictured on the left Songs From A Village Garret, folk songs sung and played by Raphael Boguslav, recorded about the time I was born. I loved the music and listened to it often, even after I discovered rock and roll. Boguslav stayed in the music business through the 1960s, but he never was a huge success and spent the rest of his life as one of the best known calligraphers in the United States.

So anyway, fast forward several decades. Songs from this ancient album would still get stuck in my head, so I searched for it online and bought a copy on eBay. (Thanks, Meg! I'm still not voting for you and I hope the millions you spent on this disastrous campaign will taste like ashes in your mouth until the day you die. Love and Kisses!) A friend had the tech to turn a record into .mpg files, so I now have the album on my computer and can listen to it at my convenience.

So far, so good.

If you go on The You Tubes, you can find a video about Boguslav's calligraphy, but none of his music. After I bought the album, I had a short e-mail correspondence with the artist, who was a very gracious person. He died earlier this year, and I thought that there should be some record of his music in the most important music library of today, The You Tubes.

I wanted to make an iMovie of his version of the traditional American folk song Buffalo Skinners, but iMovie doesn't like .mpg files, it only wants .mp4 files. This means I was able to make videos of Burl Ives and my own music, but trying to share Ray Boguslav's music with the world is so far no go.

If anybody knows an easy workaround, I'd be glad to entertain any suggestions.

My first post to The You Tubes

Last week, I had a song stuck in my head that I hadn't heard in years, Ghost Riders In The Sky. While I concede it's a little corny and old fashioned, I like it a lot. I'm not sure what brought it to mind, but I think it might be that it's similar in rhythm to an old folk song named Buffalo Skinners, which I have on my iTunes list sung by Raphael Boguslav, a folk musician in the 1950s and 1960s who went into calligraphy as a profession. You can see his calligraphy work on The You Tubes through this link.


Thinking about Ghost Riders In The Sky running through my head, it only made sense I get a version on my computer. I mean, what's 99 cents? And 99 cents on a credit card bill seems even smaller. There are about a jillion versions, the most famous by the baritone singer Vaughn Monroe. The song is made to be dramatic and bombastic, and after Monroe made a big hit of it, every version thereafter seemed to be about virtuosity or big production values.

But then I listened to about thirty seconds of a version by Burl Ives. He was the first to record the song in February 1949 and his version is very simple, just Burl singing in his haunting tenor voice and strumming a guitar. much sparser than Monroe's big hit recorded a month later or the famous jangly guitar version by Duane Eddy decades after. I decided to plunk my money down to get the Burl Ives version.

I went to The You Tubes to see what was there. There were lots of versions, naturally, including one by Burl Ives. But it was a later recording that made a big production number of it, like almost all recordings after Monroe set the standard. I decided I would put up the Burl Ives original.


I made a "video" with iMovie. It's just a title card and pictures of Burl alternating with illustrations of the story. I thought it would be better than looking at a blank screen.

The process takes a while, but now that I know how to do it, I'll be adding more videos to my channel. For the most part, I'll stick to putting up songs of my own to avoid any copyright hassles, but I'm also thinking of putting up some of the really rare stuff I have on my ITunes collection, most especially the songs of Raphael Boguslav from his album from the 1950s Songs From A Village Garrett.

Let me know what you think, either with comments here or in the comment section of the video.