Blues Calendar

[Loaf]

Hi Guys, I want to bring this website to your attention:

http://bluesimages.com/

I love these calendars of original blues artwork and i've been buying them for 4 years now. They come with a free CD of the music from the artwork featured in the calendar plus a few extra rare tracks, and it's all great stuff. The guy who puts them together is struggling at the moment because so many of the retail outlets for his calendars are going out of business and 2010 might be the last year he makes them

So if you're at all interested, I highly recommend it (so does R Crumb if that's any indication).


edit: p.s. it's 1920s blues like Charley Patton, not dad-wank white blues.

[Daniel S.]

Thanks for sharing this. I've just started getting interested in the blues. Right now I'm listening to classic Chicago Blues - Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Willie Dixon, etc. I discovered them from being a fan of Clapton, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. I'm not sure if I will get into 1920's blues, when did powerful lead guitar players join blues bands?

[Loaf]

I'd guess mostly when blues went from acoustic to electric. I don't like a lot of electric blues, but I love Howlin Wolf - especially the lead guitar on Spoonful (played by Hubert Sumlin, i think?). That makes my hair stand on end. The sound of electricity.

[Loaf]

Bump.

It's the time of year when all the little boys and girls start thinking about what calendar they're gonna get for the new year, and what christmas presents they're gonna get for their loved ones.

Why not combine them both into one and buy a calendar of 1920s Blues posters?

http://bluesimages.com/

I am.

[Myk Luhv]

That is an awesome calendar, my god!

I have recently (within the last year or so) become enamoured with the blues of most every variety, from inter-war period stuff to post-war electric blues to L.A. jump blues and so on. One thing I don't understand, however, is Texas blues and what I take to be their descendants. It just seems so... anaemic! I'm thinking of the sort of blues you hear that has the cliche organ-and-guitar accompaniment which seems to be ubiquitous these days in blues music. Although it is not precisely what I mean, this is something like what I'm talking about. I'm sure it's fine music to listen to when you're out at a bar drinking but... it's nothing I would listen to otherwise. This need not be the case though! I mean, sure, you're probably not going to play Blind Willie Johnson or Charley Patton to a bunch of folks looking to drink and have a good time but... even someone like Guy Davis or Corey Harris can play the blues in ways that are not so comatose while catering to both sides of the blues: upbeat and downtrodden (or whatever). It seems to me that blues musicians these days have a discouraging lack of understanding when it comes to the history of the blues and so they take this sort of Texas blues -- or 'roadhouse blues', perhaps? -- as what is meant by the term in toto, seemingly forgetting almost entirely the aforementioned folks or Howlin' Wolf or Champion Jack Dupree or Robert Wilkins or Slim Harpo and so on and so forth. What surprised me about "the blues" when I first began to seriously get into it is how diverse of a genre it is and can be, and this seems to be unknown to a surprising number of blues artists these days. What's up with that? It is likely just what happens when it becomes something like more mainstream -- invariably it will become homogenised and sound virtually the same for good or ill (think: Alligator Records) because that's what sells... Nevertheless, I find this whole thing disappointing anyway.

Anyway, I'm done ranting.

[Rocker]

Thanks for sharing this. I've just started getting interested in the blues. Right now I'm listening to classic Chicago Blues - Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Willie Dixon, etc. I discovered them from being a fan of Clapton, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. I'm not sure if I will get into 1920's blues, when did powerful lead guitar players join blues bands?

Electric blues started in the big cities because you didn't have electricity in the country or you couldn't aford it. Late 40s/early 50s is my guess. Memphis, Chicago, Detroit. Those are the metropoles for electric blues.
Fascinating music and culture, especially if you don't listen to many of those so called "experts" who try to make something (intellectual or philosophical) out of the music that it never was and never will be if you understand what's the real basis of it. You'll also learn how terrible many of the big bands were in playing blues. Clapton really is an exception.
I love blues of the 20s and that periode, but then I love almost every kind of blues. If you want to get into it, get some Robert Johnson and one of the two CDs of Clapton doing Johnson's songs (Me& Mr Johnson, Sessions for Robrt J:, the latter including a DVD). But of course this is not the only kind of blues from those years.

[Myk Luhv]

I've never listened to any British blues because I figure I can just skip over their reverence entirely and listen to the originators. I don't need to hear some white guy slavishly copy "Dust My Broom" when I can just listen to Elmore James' own recording of it. (This may not have been the case in the 1960s, but that is not relevant anymore because now we can listen to the original artists far more easily and not have to put up with John Hammond's covers of Willie Dixon songs!)

[Rocker]

I've never listened to any British blues because I figure I can just skip over their reverence entirely and listen to the originators. I don't need to hear some white guy slavishly copy "Dust My Broom" when I can just listen to Elmore James' own recording of it. (This may not have been the case in the 1960s, but that is not relevant anymore because now we can listen to the original artists far more easily and not have to put up with John Hammond's covers of Willie Dixon songs!)

Well, I think John Hammond Jr. did somevery good stuff (btw his versions of "Maybelline" and "No money down" are heard in Two-Lane Blacktop). But yeah, there's a lot of terrible bands that came up with the 60s bluesrevival.

Well, it's kinda emberessing to me that I didn't know his before, because this music is my terrain if you get what I mean, but did you know that this goes way back and wasn't a Ram Jam-original?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=related&hl=en&v=sYrK464nIeY&gl=US

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4XFXJSQQOI

[guitarfool2002]

Any talk of revivals will bring in bands or artists who really jumped on board for the ride and nothing else, but there was someone who in the early 80's could be credited with getting the blues and blues artists back into the mainstream and that was Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Honestly, to this very moment I really cannot understand the level of vitriol put out against Stevie Ray on various discussions from the past. It's OK to not like the man's music but the level of anger against the very thought of him seems unusual.

How many more people bought records from and tickets to see Albert King, Buddy Guy, Lonnie Mack, and other blues artists who had been all but left behind by 1983 because of Stevie Ray's music and interviews? And how many also got into the blues via listening to Stevie Ray and then helped put guys like Robert Cray and others who were toiling in obscurity onto much larger stages and increased their record sales by thousands? Put it this way - were there any other blues acts selling hundreds of thousands of records in the 5 or so years before Stevie Ray's debut album?

It's the talk of the 60's British revival, which did produce a lot of truly forgettable faux "blues" bands, that got me thinking of Stevie Ray's influence on bringing the blues back from a sort of regional obscurity and into a mainstream music form again as it had been in the 60's.