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Advice on Cajun and Deep Southern Blues

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    Advice on Cajun and Deep Southern Blues

    This is not an area I know much on but I'm sure there are some experts on here. Every now and then I'll hear something from the deep south of the States I like but never quite sure who the real guys are who are/did produce some good stuff and who are the fakesters. I like some of the accordian driven Cajun stuff and the true sounding blues if it helps?

    Any advice on individual artists/groups/albums and worthwhile compilations? Thanks.

    #2
    Advice on Cajun and Deep Southern Blues

    "accordion driven Cajun stuff"--it's called zydeco, so that should help you out in looking for stuff.

    I have some stuff, but unfortunately it's on my out-of-commission PC.

    Rhino put out a great blues series title Blues Masters. They got up into the teens in terms of number of releases, but unfortunately many are out of print. On the other hand, I remember they focused a lot on urban blues, though there was a Texas Blues release. You might be able to find some of those around.

    In terms of artists, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker are obviously major figures. For Delta blues--the kind of stuff it seems you're looking for--Son House and Elmore James would also be some names you should look for.

    You might want to browse Alligator Records' discography--they're a blues label. I'd also recommend listening to KKJZ, Cal State Long Beach's music station. It's mostly jazz, but they also have some DJs that play the blues, and they have a blues-only show on the weekend. They have podcasts, but I can't see what they are, so that might be useless.

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      #3
      Advice on Cajun and Deep Southern Blues

      "accordion driven Cajun stuff"--it's called zydeco, so that should help you out in looking for stuff.
      Not really.

      The divide between cajun and zydeco music runs pretty much in parallel with the divide beween white and black communities in that part of the world.

      The two musics have many similarities:both feature accordions - driving accordions at that - and relatively primitive percussion instruments clobbered to almighty - the triangle is cajun music, the rub-board in zydeco.

      Zydeco music is noticeably influenced by blues, and is much more likely to be played on electric instruments. Cajun music contains much more of the French folk songs and dance tunes of the colonist forebears of the musicians, and features fiddles and other acoustic instrumentation.

      Perhaps counter-intuitively, I find cajun music rather more gritty, thrilling and even soulful than zydeco, but that could just be me.

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        #4
        Advice on Cajun and Deep Southern Blues

        Thanks for explaining that--I stand corrected.

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          #5
          Advice on Cajun and Deep Southern Blues

          I wil chack out a couple of my compilations tomorrow but, off the top of my head, Boozoo Chavis is excellent especially "Dog Hill"

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            #6
            Advice on Cajun and Deep Southern Blues

            I've got a fair bit of this at home DG. I'll put together a recomend list at the weekend that you can use or ignore. It's great when you get into a new genre for the first time and everything is fresh. Enjoy!

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              #7
              Advice on Cajun and Deep Southern Blues

              Howlin' Wolf has done some pretty intense Delta Blues and give a try to Blind Lemon Jefferson, nominally a Texas Blues player but his style was very much his own.

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                #8
                Advice on Cajun and Deep Southern Blues

                What they said about the Zydeco/Cajun distinction. It's not my area, but I do know that, as Paul Simon observed, Clifton Chenier is "the king of Zydeco". You really can't go wrong with him. And second the Boozoo Chavis.

                I have more to write about Delta and Deep blues than I do on perhaps any other subject which, as you will appreciate, is rather a lot. But at the moment, my Dad is listening to Eric Clapton on the telly, and it's poisoning my mind.

                I hereby promise that at some point over the weekend I will break a bough off of the learning tree, and tan all of your asses with it like government mules...

                In the meantime, the available recorded works of Otha (Othar) Turner are few, and far too raw for most. But every note of them is entirely essential, and it's certainly, the deepest, oldest-styled blues you'll hear.

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                  #9
                  Advice on Cajun and Deep Southern Blues

                  No, sod it. here's a first tranch.

                  Robert Johnson is the opening gambit for anyone who wants to know Delta Blues. in may ways, he represents its highest and altest point of development - he prefigured the move to electric guitars and, while all his extant recordings are acoustic, there are plenty of musicologists who'll tell you he played like he was used to amplification. He is not merely a peerless singer, he not only wrings more lyrical nuance out of blues cliches than anybody would until Bob Dylan, but he is an utterly, entirely, beyond question, peerless guitarist. You know why everyone believed he sold his soul to the devil to play like that? Because it's the only conceivable explanation. Start with Johnson.

                  A few people have mentioned Muddy Waters. The vast majority of his stuff is the start of electrified, Chicago blues, rather than Delta stuff proper. But the "plantation recordings" he made with Alan Lomax are jaw-dropping. Lomax went to where Johnson had come from to see if any other musicians had his style - one poor-as-shit farmer's name kept cropping up. Waters was recorded by Lomax, and was so impressed at the results that he upped sticks, moved to Chicago, and invented what would become rock and roll about twenty years later when whites started to understand what he was doing.

                  That's moving forward from Johnson. Move backwards. He sort-of taught Muddy Waters guitar, but Son House taught him. House was a big bad motherfucker with the gruffest voice you ever heard. He sounds like a force of nature. There's a recording of him doing "Rolling and Tumbling" where a train goes past as he's singing - you can hear him match his voice to it, and fucking win.

                  House learned from Charley Patton. Patton's music is mostly badly preserved, as it's very early, but is decades ahead of its time in terms of sophistication. He's almost as gruff as House at times, almost as sweet as Sam Cooke at others. His guitar-playing is wonderfully intricate - rather astounding when you remember he pioneered the tricks of playing behind his back or "with his teeth" that we associate with Jimi Hendrix, without the amplification which made those tricks feasible for Hendrix.

                  Contemporary with him, but as noted a Texan, is Blind Lemon Jefferson. Lemon is the most intricate guitarist of them all, bar maybe Skip James. Again, all recordings are poor quality - they sometimes sound like they're from another planet. And he's a heartbreakingly anguished singer. he's also, of the major players, the most idiosyncratic, the one who shows least signs of ever having played with a band. By which I mean, he almost never plays twelve bars regularly - he plays eleven, ten, thirteen, twelve and a half... The guy is entirely sui generis.

                  Also Texan, also Blind, is Blind Willie McTell. Not merely the subject of Bob Dylan's best ever song, McTell is the greatest, sweetest, most impassioned singer who ever lived. Played twelve-string guitar "falling down like rain". Strange, otherworldly, and driven beyond your or my understanding.

                  Often confused is the other texan Blind Willie, another Mr. Johnson. But I'm going to leave telling you about him to Josh Lyman -

                  Voyager, in case it's ever encountered by extra-terrestrials, is carrying photos of life on Earth, greetings in 55 languages and a collection of music from Gregorian chants to Chuck Berry. Including "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground" by '20s bluesman Blind Willie Johnson, whose stepmother blinded him when he was seven by throwing lye in is his eyes after his father had beat her for being with another man. He died, penniless, of pneumonia after sleeping bundled in wet newspapers in the ruins of his house that burned down. But his music just left the solar system.
                  Ry Cooder, who based the entire Paris, Texas soundtrack around that piece, called it "the most transcendent piece of American music ever recorded". Yet "John The Revelator" is perhaps even greater. An utterly ferocious piece of singing.

                  Other Texans - Leadbelly is an even bigger, badder, motherfucker than Son House. Played twelve-string like it was a set of drums, sang like he was a set of bellows. Lightnin' Hopkins is late, and electric, but he's a sly old alky, and plays in a largely unaccompanied and quasi-acoustic style, like John Lee Hooker. His style owes a great deal to...

                  SKIP FUCKIN' JAMES. Skip sings like a banshee, like a choir of ghosts all at once, like a boy soprano who's just raped your Ma. A delicate, halting, and tentative evocation of pure, utter malice. People thought Robert Johnson played guitar as though the devil had taught him? Skip James sang like he was taking the piss out of Satan to his face. And the exquisiteness of his guitar-playing is matched only by that of his (less known) piano playing.

                  Right, that should be enough to be going on with. I could be here for months talking about minor figures...

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                    #10
                    Advice on Cajun and Deep Southern Blues

                    I've been reading this thread with interest, as I'm supposed to be putting some Zydeco on a CD I'm doing for a friend of my mum's 60th party. She wants lots of upbeat stuff that people can dance to (were 60th parties always like that?) and most of the Deep South Blues I know isn't really suitable - for instance God Don't Like It (And I Don't Either) by Blind Willie McTell is awesome, but I don't think Nureyev could dance to it.

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                      #11
                      Advice on Cajun and Deep Southern Blues

                      My only trip to New Orleans, I went to see Rockin' Dopsie (who calls his stuff "zydecajun", just to confuse things) at the Maple Leaf. It was the nth anniversary of the band's first gig there, and they played till 3am. And the beer was free, courtesy of the band. Unbelievable.

                      Englishmen can't do the two-step, I claim. Though Andy C can almost certainly make a liar of me there.

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                        #12
                        Advice on Cajun and Deep Southern Blues

                        It helps if you have one leg shorter than the other. Which I don't.

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                          #13
                          Advice on Cajun and Deep Southern Blues

                          Right now, at 1:18pm Eastern Standard Time, on www.wwoz.org , there's a cajun show. It's every Sunday at 1pm Eastern. The next two weekends wwoz will be broadcasting from the Jazz Fest, with two weekends of a lot of acts.

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                            #14
                            Advice on Cajun and Deep Southern Blues

                            http://www.wwoz.org/ontheair/programschedule/

                            Here's the program schedule. Sundays from 12-2 central.

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                              #15
                              Advice on Cajun and Deep Southern Blues

                              Thanks to everyone for all this info! Some I knew a good few I didn't. Busy scribbling down ideas and will get rummaging. Much appreciated.

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