Frankie McWhorter: Cowboy Fiddler in Bob Wills' Band

This excellent narrative, as told to John R. Erickson and published in 1997, offers some great commentary on Bob Wills' playing out of meter.
To quote from p. 34: "one time the band was recording a song and one of the musicians quit playing. Bob asked him what was wrong. 'Bob, you're playing that song out of meter.' Bob asked him what he meant by that. 'Well, you're holding that note thirteen beats and you ought to be holding it just four.' And he played it and showed Bob what he meant.
"Bob said, 'That's the way I feel it. That's the way I do it, whether it's right or wrong, and that's the way we're going to do it. If the Lord had written the first music, I wouldn't question you at all, but a man wrote the first music and for all you know, I may be smarter than he was. If you don't want to play it like this, put your fiddle up and be gone.' And the old boy left.
From page 38:
"A lot of those tunes were out of meter. When he found a note he liked, he'd hang on to it."
From page 61:
"He'd play out of tune on occasion and he'd break meter quite often. The people who were studied and professional knew that they were right and he was wrong. But what they didn't take into consideration was that he was Bob Wills, and he was signing the checks."
Frankie McWhorter was a Texas Playboy in the 1950s and 60s. Regarding his "out of tune" comment, he refers elsewhere in the book to twin-fiddling with Bob, where he played the same notes out of tune each time, because he liked it that way,and Frankie had to learn those notes and positions, as well as emulate Bob Wills' long bow technique.
I enjoyed so many of these details in the book, as they help articulate Bob Wills' blues and jazz interests, which stood him apart from all other fiddlers, and in his fame, stood him apart from all other country bands. The term "western swing," which to some seems archaic and descriptive of a certain pragmatic approach to dance music, seems to me more than ever a term of high esteem and honor, standing on its own and not just a hybrid of other things.

Use these photos to identify the mfr. and model of your record needle!

Woody Guthrie, Big Bend, and making it all up

Woody Guthrie's Seeds of Man was inspired by a 1931 trip the author remembered.... or mis-remembered... in 1947-8. The novel wasn't published until 1976.
By evidence of this rambling tome, Woody Guthrie wrote more about his 1931 trip to Big Bend, than about any other single topic. Although, that may be unfairly comparing songs to prose.
A visitor to the mysterious border wilderness known as Big Bend, where Seeds of Man is set, will not quickly grasp how formative was Guthrie's own visit. He was an impressionable young man in 1931 whose travels thus far had been limited to Oklahoma and Texas. Woodrow Wilson Guthrie took his family gift of music and optimism farther than any Guthrie had before. It some ways, it could be said this magical trip started it all.
In 1941 he was part of the propaganda effort for the Coulee and Bonneville dams on the Columbia River. 26 ballads in 30 days, he had so much creativity coming out of him. His autobiographical novel Bound for Glory came in 1943. As he began to feel the curse of Huntington's Disease in the late 1940's, he typed like a madman on a novel he originally titled Study Butte,calling it "An Experience Lived and Dreamed," the chronicle of a search to look for his family's lost silver claim in the Christmas Mountains.
According to family legend, Guthrie patriarch Jeremiah Pearsall Guthrie, "Jerry P.," had a brother Gid who owned much of what became the Sam Nail ranch. The remains of Sam Nail's ranch buildings, including a still-pumping water well which feeds a desert oasis, were at my last visit (20+ years ago),located a mere five minute walk from Ross Maxwell Drive in the park, clearly marked for tourists.
Jerry P. helped out intermittently on Gid's ranch, chasing cows and guarding his property against Mexican raids. On one of these forays, he discovered ore while stopping to take a drink from a mineral spring. It was assayed as $100 of silver per ton, $10 of gold, plus copper, zinc, mercury and other minerals. Jerry P. left his name on a piece of paper wired to a pile of flat rocks to mark his claim.
Instead of returning to work the claim, he was distracted by news of free Oklahoma land being given to native Americans whose names appeared on tribal rolls. Jerry P.'s second wife had been one eighth Creek, so he figured he had a shot. He moved back to Oklahoma, didn't get the land, and died before he could return to Big Bend.
When I talked with Guthrie biographer Joe Klein about this story, he said, "the idea that Jerry P. Guthrie had discovered a rich vein of silver in the mountains near Uncle Gid's ranch was one of the least likely and most persistent of family legends."
So persistent in fact, that Woody, his father Charley, brother Roy, and uncle Jeff Davis Guthrie, went on a "strange, joyous, memorable debacle" in search of the wealth.
As Seeds of Man describes, they drove from Pampa, Texas to the desert in 2 days in a broken down old Model T. As they drove into Terlingua they saw the mansion of the owner of the quicksilver mine, on the right up on a hill, where it stood when last seen. At my decades-ago visit, the building was occupied by Pam Weir, proprietor of the Desert Deli & Diner in the Terlingua ghost town.
Down below, he saw the adobe shacks of the mine workers, an image that would stick with Woody Guthrie.
Over to the east from Terlingua were the Chisos Mountains, which he would describe from memory 16 years later in his 842-page manuscript.
As the story goes, they came into Terlingua, wended their way to Study Butte, and found their way to Sam Nail's ranch. The tattered maps treasured in the Guthrie family outlined the location of the mine from Nail Ranch. Sam and his brother had found a small pocket of native quicksilver while walking to Alpine through the Christmas Mountains. Although the Nail entourage had been unable to locate the quicksilver pocket on their return trip, word of their discovery eventually led to the Wright mine and

the development of the Terlingua mining district, which extended 16 miles from Study Butte west to Lajitas, and was 5 miles north to south. When the Guthries met up with Sam Nail, they agreed to share the wealth.
Even though traces of cinnabar, or quicksilver ore, had been reported early as 1889, large scale production began around 1903 with founding of the Chisos Mining Company, and was a linchpin of the local economy until 1946 (and then again for a short time in the 1960s).
Of the novel, Joe Klein told me, "he made it all up.... it was maybe that one trip when he was really close to his dad and his uncle, and it was the kind of thing that was mostly bereft in his childhood."

Michael Feinstein's American Songbook DVD set

This Three-Park Series on PBS is subtitled "Cultural History, Intimate Biography, and a front-row seat at great live performances." It is all that and more. The cultural history revolves around how the "American Songbook" was once focused on movies and plays, how it became a propaganda arm of the Allies in WWII, and how things changed after that war.

The intimate biography is of Michael Feinstein, not that intimate perhaps, but focusing on his acquisition of artifacts from the 20th century American Songbook, in order to keep the 21st century from forgetting them. This is the part that engaged me the most. Feinstein knocks on doors of collections both grandly indexed and-- just as likely-- sadly dilapidated. He zeroes right in on items of merit, if you believe the DVD, but editing must have helped. Though his scouting is far more glamorous than my own similar journeys, the end result is, for old musical memorabilia, the same. A temporary reprieve from the landfill.

People just don't have time to see what's on those old tape reels, acetates, records. Confronted with hundreds of pieces of historic sheet music from a relative, the inheritor is often overwhelmed. But I'm not. Michael Feinstein is most certainly not. We wade through these things because "lost" and "lost but not forgotten" are basically the same, in our narrow view. As Nicholson Baker has written, preservation of originals is something to be done for its own sake, even after all the proper digitizing has been duly accomplished.

Disk Two has two hours of archival clips showing some of the wartime uses of music for propaganda, such as Army sing-a-long films (long before Mitch Miller). The care taken in song delivery and offering the singer as a surrogate for the girl back home is striking. It is easy to imagine Frank Capra directing these. Other gorgeous live clips include Frank Sinatra in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s (Feinstein has a show called The Sinatra Project), and examples from Bing Crosby, Paul Whiteman, Rosemary Clooney, Alice Faye and many more.

The clips of Michael Feinstein's show are also very good, showing a performer in complete command of his material. Interestingly, his approach to romance, though fully drawn, lacks a female counterpart. He is only shown singing either alone or with other guys. I miss the guy-girl thing from network television in the 1950s and 60s. Those made-for-TV duos were strange bedfellows often as not, but the song seemed more "acted" sometimes.

Not much of a quibble for 5 hours of viewing, which I found myself watching with a permanent smile. It was sent along via a dear friend and patron of our store, who ordered me a copy of this great program directly from the producer, shopPBS.org. I have a link above if you want to buy it from amazon. Stash it with your other great 21st century collections of 20th century standards-- by Sting, Rod Stewart, Diana Krall, John Pizzarelli-- and everyone else in the gang that sang Heart of My Heart.

2010 at moneyblows books & music

This product has become our most popular CD in 2010. We began the year selling a few of them but as the band toured, "Dynamic Sound" became a must-have for fans of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. Our holdings have been expanded to include some great records coveted by audiophiles: the Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab (MFSL) reissues and jazz' famed Mosaic Box Sets. We stopped selling books from the back of Harlan Wolfe's Record Shop in Conway, ending our first experiment in "bricks and mortar" sales. We've absorbed quite a few book and record collections this year, resulting in as much as 1/3 turnover of our entire stock. By any measure (month vs. month, year over year) 2010 has been a record year at moneyblows books & music. It's exciting that the new electronic book readers are steering millions of eyeballs to the joys of reading words on a page. When you think of how many people regard a "page" as starting with the word "home" or "web"--- or is something you find in a magazine or school text--- quite a few will be surprised that pages come in paper books, too. And, most books are easily obtained for a penny (ours are more expensive) so we expect 2011 to continue the trend of increased book sales. Similar to most small businesses, we are always looking for ways to advertise efficiently. In 2010 we advertised modestly using Google ads and Facebook ads. Nearly as we can tell, no customers came from the ads. As usual, customers find us either because they already know where to go, or they are intrepid enough to wade the morass of the Web to find us. Our message of "search moneyblows" still hasn't taken hold. It's a simple message--- type moneyblows into any search engine. It'll be easier than ever to shop with us in the coming year. Which starts tomorrow. So for now I'll sign off with the time honored greeting, "Happy Old Year."

Mosaic box sets-- great gifts for jazz vinyl lovers!

The Complete Pacific Jazz Live recordings of The Chet Baker Quartet with Russ Freeman
The Complete Blue Note and Pacific Jazz Recordings of Clifford Brown
The Complete Blue Note Recordings of The Tina Brooks Quintets
The Complete Blue Note recordings of Herbie Nichols
The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk
The Complete Verve Recordings of the Buddy De Franco Quartet/quint…

Serving dog and mammon

I link to the current Ben Ratliff review of a Coleman Hawkins performance which, apparently, sheds new light on the classic "Body and Soul" that's one of Hawk's best known solos. You can look around and see the latest jazz news about William Savory's collection of disc transcriptions. Had they been released in his lifetime, or close to the time of recording (late 1930s and onward) they would be called "bootlegs" like famous recordings by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, etc.--- recorded performances by fans.
The big news is that the Savory survivors have sold the discs to the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. Even bigger is the news that they'll probably digitize and release them commercially, after giving lip service to the various ownership conundrums. The reportage on this topic, at least in the New York Times, includes some strangely annotated excerpts on their website, and a boatload of reader comments predictably bemoaning the belated and perhaps restricted access to this material.
Ben Ratliff, a real asset to the NYTimes for the jazz world, clarifies that "Nobody is yet in any position to assess when, how or what portion of the recordings can be commercially released." Since the National Jazz Museum owns the discs, which can be easily digitized, the Times is echoing Gene Kelly "Gotta Dance!" This newspaper which clearly supports "work for hire" transparently got Ratliff to write a legal disclaimer into his review. The first article, reporting the acquisition, suggests that ownership of the aircheck music on the discs is unclear. It's worth reading the comments to both articles because the ephemera aspect of a jazz solo is well displayed. And so is another chapter in the evolution of copyright practice, using old jazz as a foil.