Posts Tagged ‘country’
“Country music has always sort of been country music”*…
The DeZurik Sisters, Mary Jane and Carolyn, began performing on St. Paul’s KSTP in 1935, when they entered and won a talent contest. The next year they moved to Chicago to appear weekly on National Barn Dance, and later, also Purina’s Checkerboard Time, at WLS-AM. The girls called their act The Cackle Sisters…
Read more about the singing siblings– and their place in the annals of yodeling– here and here. And find an remarkable collection of acetate transfers of their work at the ever-extraordinary WFMU. * Miranda Lambert
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As we marvel at Minnesota throat-singing, we might send dramatic birthday greetings to Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE FRSL; he was born on this date in 1937. A journalist and drama critic, he turned to playwriting in 1960– and has since written such prominent works for the stage as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing, Jumpers, Travesties, Arcadia, and The Coast of Utopia. Sir Tom is also an accomplished screenwriter, whose many films include Brazil, The Russia House, and Shakespeare in Love. He’s won four Tony Awards and one Oscar.
How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field… Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.
– George, Jumpers, Act I
From wailin’ to Waylon…
15 July 1972, Billerica, MA — Don Stover was a bluegrass banjo picker from White Oak, West Virginia. In 1952 he joined the Lilly Brothers from nearby Beckley, and headed for Boston, where they played together for over eighteen years at the (in)famous Hillbilly Ranch. Stover had great influence on a generation of important young banjo pickers, from Bill Keith (who introduced chromatic scales to bluegrass as a member of Bill Monroe’s band) to Bela Fleck (the bluegrass and jazz-fusion star)
Courtesy of the always fascinating Selvedge Yard, a selection of photos from the archive of photographer Henry Horenstein, “Portraits of Country Music 1972-1981“– a time before CMT and “New Country,” a time when country was… well, country.
15 July 1974, Berryville, Virginia — Bluegrass music fans at the Berryville Bluegrass Festival
15 July, 1975, Cambridge, MA. Waylon Jennings began as his career as a Cricket (Buddy Holly’s bass player) and ended it as an Outlaw (a member of the group that also included Willie Nelson, Tompall Glaser, and Billy Joe Shaver). Along the way, he conspired with Johnny Cash in the addled 60s , then charted a series of hits that included the classic “Mama Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”
See the rest of Horenstein’s arresting photos at The Selvedge Yard.
As we pine for a PBR, we might recall that it was on this date in 1955 that, in another corner of the music world, Chuck Berry’s first hit record, “Maybellene” entered the R&B chart. Piano player Johnnie Johnson recalls that he and Berry rewrote the song at the suggestion of Leonard Chess: “It was an old fiddle tune called ‘Ida Red'[recorded in 1938 by Bob Wills]. I changed the music and re-arranged it, Chuck re-wrote the words, and the rest, as they say, was history. Leonard Chess asked me to come up to record it live. At that time, someone else already had a song out by the same name, so we had to change our version. We noticed a mascara box in the corner, so we changed the name to ‘Maybellene.'”
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