Blues

This is Time Signatures with Jim Ervin, a podcast presented by the Capital Area Blues Society in Lansing, Michigan.

Now, most any modern musical style can trace its roots back to the blues.

Time Signatures explores the blues and its musical connections with captivating interviews, lively discussions, and news from the world of blues.

Talk about a diversified pedigree.

He has produced some of the biggest names in the blues, including Johnny Winter, Albert Collins, Roy Buchanan, and Charlie Musselwhite, among others.

He co-produced the album Showdown with Albert Collins, Robert Cray, and Johnny Copeland, an album, by the way, that won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album in 1987.

And finally, he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in Memphis in 2014 for, quote, his multitudinous contributions as a non-performer.

There's a lot to talk about here, so let's get him in here.

I mean, and he was the spark that ignited St. Louis's reputation as a source for blues, urban blues, at least at that time, a reputation that was sort of forgotten.

But He was a force to be reckoned with.

And he also won the St. Louis Blues Contest in 1925 at the Booker Washington Theater.

He won it 18 weeks in a row.

So let's give the audience some credit in St. Louis for recognizing how good this guy was.

So these genre lines are pretty artificial and drawn by people in record stores looking to file things more so than by musicians who I think are much more open-minded and you know ready to to to mix and cross-pollinate but another story of somebody who does not get their proper due these days is st louis his pd wheat straw who this guy cut at least 160 sides and he openly promoted himself with satanic imagery like he called himself the devil's son-in-law and the high sheriff from hell long before robert johnson was associated you know that kind of stuff i mean robert johnson had a couple songs with some some satanic imagery but you know it was really sun house popularizing the story about the crossroads long after robert johnson was dead how does petey wheatstraw get overlooked and and tell us about petey and what he accomplished and let's give him his due i mean How did this guy cut 160 sides? Because this is in the peak of the Depression when a lot of I mean, the Carter family couldn't even cut records at this point.

Like the record industry nearly died.

But St. Louis Blues seems like it powered right through the 1930s.

Let's hear some more.

Here's Louis Armstrong spinning off of Decca from 54 and Spooks on the Halloween Rhythm and Blues edition of The Juke in the Back.

The other night about 12 o'clock I thought I'd go downstairs just to check the lock When I heard something in the house, I don't mean a mouse.

I swear they was spooks, spooks, spooks.

You've got everything that a hoodoo woman needs You've got everything that a hoodoo woman needs A bushel full of herbs, bags full of gyms and weeds New Orleans woman, I'd better let you be New Orleans woman, I'd better let you be Better leave you, baby, before you make a zombie out of me

Ah, we're getting into the voodoo now, baby.

That's Voodoo Woman Blues, Jay McShann and his sextet, featuring the always together Jimmy Witherspoon on lead vocal and backed up by McShann on piano, Clarence Thornton on trumpet, Theodore Small blowing that alto, Seward Evans blowing the tenor, Percy Gabriel on bass, and Jesse Price banging on them tubs.

That came out on Mercury in 1946, digging the voodoo woman blues.