Leonard Chess and his Chicago-based Chess Records has been getting a lot of attention these days with two recent movies, Cadillac Records and Who Do You Love?. Of course, the filmmakers behind each film couldn't possibly have included every influential artist who recorded for the label but somehow both failed to include one of the greatest, the "one and only Sonny Boy Williamson", who recorded ...
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The bullets of the false revenge have struck us once againAs the angry seas have struck upon the sandAnd it seemed as though a friendless world had lost itself a friendThat was the President and that was the man.Tragedy struck the United States when its youthful leader was gunned down while riding in a motorcade through Dallas, Texas. We now know that John Kennedy wasn't the portrait of health ...
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According to the latest census, Carroll County, Mississippi is home to about ten thousand residents, less than half of the number that inhabited the county a century ago. By the standards of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, it was a remote place off of the beaten path. J. S. McCain had a sizable plantation spread there, near the town of Teoc. It was from there that McCain'...
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I think that out of all of the groups that I have heard that none quite exhibited the loose swagger that can make rock and roll so great than Britain's late, lamented Faces. Next Sunday, three of the five are set to take the stage at the Helping the Heart of Music show benefitting the PRS for Music Members Benevolent Fund. As such, I felt it appropriate to post a few highlights of the group's 2004
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Philip Parris Lynott was born in the Black Country on August 20, 1949, exactly one year after the Black Country's undisputed rock god, Robert Anthony Plant. The illegitimate son of an Irish mother and an Afro-Guyanese father, he would be brought up a Mancunian long enough to develop an affection for the Manchester United Football Club. When he arrived a few years later to live with his mother's...
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In April 1967, in order to take advantage of lower corporate tax rates, The Beatles entered into a partnership called "Beatles and Co." Each member individually owned five percent of the company, with the remaining eighty percent controlled by a new corporation collectively owned by all four. This corporation was soon dubbed "Apple". Brian Epstein's death that August signaled a void in the grou...
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The way the stars aligned, it turned out that the group wouldn't tour behind Music From Big Pink. Helm had a motorcycle accident that had left his leg in bad shape and Manuel had grilled the top of his foot. Just as they were recovering, Danko had a car accident, breaking his neck rather severely and requiring him to stay in traction for three and a half months. The longer The Band made the peo...
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In 1967, the four former Hawks, now simply referred to as "the band", joined Dylan in Woodstock, New York. Their mornings were spent at Dylan's home as he wrote in a fury, ten songs a week for nine months. Manuel and Robertson both took to working on their own songs, too, with Manuel and Danko occasionally adding bits here and there to Dylan's. In the afternoons and evenings, the group would recor
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Ronnie Hawkins was a rockabilly singer looking for a new group in the spring of 1958. He headed back to his home state, Arkansas, to get together a band. Among his recruits into "The Hawks" was a high school senior named Levon Helm, a guitarist and singer who could keep a Bo Diddley beat on the drums if necessary. After six months of practice (by which time Helm had finished his studies), drumm...
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As a rule, I generally don't like female singers. The ones who sing the songs of others aren't typically worth my time and the ones who sing their own songs more often than not annoy me. I don't have anyone to fill me in on great female singer/songwriters, I have to try to discover them myself and it's been hard… in my eyes, one of those few and far between great ones was the late Judee Sill.Si.
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