Something close to God
.. width="425" height="350">..>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
.. width="425" height="350">..>
"Mississippi" Fred McDowell was born and grew up in Rossville,a small farming community just east of Memphis and just north of the Mississippi border. The "Mississippi" designation came later in life, after he moved down to Como, Mississippi about 40 miles south of Memphis on the 51 Highway, in his late thirties. McDowell was born about 1904 or 1905, and worked most of his life as a farm laborer, mill worker, and tractor driver. He played music at country dances and juke joints, though as he says, "I wasn't making money from music... sometimes they'd pay me, and sometimes they wouldn't." In his late 50s he was 'discovered' and recorded by folklorists Shirley Collins.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This estimation of McDowell's talent has been confirmed my many musicians and writers since, and he has been called "one of the two most important interpreters of the old country-style blues to have been newly discovered during the urban folk music 'arrival' of the [1960s]." After Alan Lomax recorded him, McDowell began playing full-time, composing new songs and refining and extending his materials, and performed at clubs, universities, the Newport Folk Festival and on European concert tours. He was a stunning master of the bottleneck guitar style, playing in open-chord country tunings. Ed Denson wrote, "Fred has a style which sounds quite modern, although it was unmistakably developed in the 1920s and '30s. It is much more like the electric 'down-home' sound of Muddy Waters or Elmore James than the older, more melodic style associated with Charlie Patton or other first-generation bluesmen." McDowell spoke about his own life in interviews.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I couldn't tell you exactly the date I was born. I was born in Rossville, Tennessee... I was about 21 when I left Rossville. There I was plowing with a mule. My father was a farmer and I worked with him. We were working twelve acres, growing cotton, peas and corn. I went to Memphis from there. I just got tired of plowing. I went there to look around, and after I got there I started working the Buckeye Oil Mill, sacking corn. Yellow corn, oats, sweet peas, and all like that. They had a great big plant out there. I stayed there about three years, I think. Then I loafed around, stayed with different people, friends. I worked for the Dixon brothers hooking logs on the track."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I was just a young man when I started playing guitar. In my teens, I was. I used to go to dances. I used to sing to the music whilst others was playing. When they'd quit, I'd always grab the guitar, go to doing something with it. I was watching them pretty close to see what they were doing. My older sister-- I nearly forgot-- played a little guitar, but she didn't teach me anything. I didn't get a guitar of mine until 1941. When I was learning, when I was young, I was playing other people's guitars...The way I got my first guitar-- Mr. Taylor, a white man from Texas, he gave me a guitar. I was working in a milk dairy in White Station, near Memphis. This was right before I'd moved to Mississippi. I wasn't making money from music. Just playing around for dances and like that..
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I learned a lot from one fellow, Raymond Payne, in Rossville. He was really good. Played regular style, not bottleneck. I got that bottleneck style from my uncle. He was an old man, the first person I ever saw play with that. He didn't play with a bottleneck, though. You know this big bone you get out of a steak? Well, he done let it dry and smoothed it off and it sounded just like that bottleneck. That's the first somebody I saw play like that. This was in Rossville. I was a little bitty boy when I heard him do that, and after I learned how to play I made me one and tried it too. Started off playing with a pocketknife. I just remembered him doing it. He didn't show me. Nothing. I never could hardly learn no music by nobody trying to show me. Like, I hear you play tonight. Well, next week sometime it would come to me... what you was playing. I'd get the sound of it in my head, then I'd do it my way from what I remembered...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I made up a lot of the songs I sing. It's like you hear a record or something or other. Well, you pick out some words out of that record that you like. You sing that and add something else onto it. It's just like if you're going to pray, and mean it, things will be in your mind. As fast as you get one word out, something else will come in there. Songs should tell the truth... When I play-- if you pay attention, what I sing the guitar sings, too. And what the guitar say, I say."
...New T-Model Ford album available called "Jack Daniel Time" go get it !...... "if you like t-model ford, you’ll dig this record; if you like raw blues in general, you’ll dig this record; if you like moonshine, dirty old men or knife fights, you’ll dig this record."
so . . . that should include everyone on this board. please run out and buy the new record. you'll be glad you did. you can order it online at www. mudpuppyrecordings. com If you love Fred you'll dig T-Model Ford
"Sounds like wind blowing in a wheatfield, train rolling down the line, rain coming down on a old tin shed, steel, wire and a rusty heart. Boots of leather and dust and ash. Mollasess and coal and stone. Wedding rings and buried bones of love broken and burnt. Tales and the footprints, ravenswings and souls are earnt"
Hey!! i updated my profile this morning and finally added some videos and pics from this crazy ass party i went to on christmas eve, check it out you wont believe who got all wild when they were drunk LMAO!!!!
being on the spiritual path. being on the spiritual path is having the hunger that makes us seek and ask..and the spiritual is the beautiful and whatever makes us dance and laugh..the spiritual path is like a river and how water wears away the stone..of the islands we are stranded on all alone..and like a child running and playing in the rain..a sunflower on a cloudy day waiting for the sun to shine again..the growing pains and is our souls giving birth..to a new heaven and a more perfect earth.
I was in Dobell's Record store on the Charing Cross Road,London in about 1969 & they played Fred through the shop speakers...that piecing bottle neck...I was souled man..the rest is history!!!
guess what i just got?! you wouldnt believe it if i told you lol, but you know all those lame azz ads people are sending to each other about $500 Macys cards? i got a chance to do one and ya its legit. makes sense now why its so popular lmao. i think i got mine from this site right here, im not sure so click to go see real quick. if its right make sure you grab one so we can shop it up
On July 30 a headstone will be dedicated at the grave of blues and gospel artist Jessie Mae Hemphill, who died on July 22, 2006, and was buried a week later on July 30.
Hemphill, who was born October 18, 1923, was best known as a blues guitarist, songwriter and vocalist, and in this capacity toured widely in Europe and won several W.C. Handy Awards for her recordings. For many years she also performed as drummer in fife and drum bands, a long-established musical tradition in her native north Mississippi. Her grandfather was Sid Hemphill, a multi-instrumentalist who was recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress.
The dedication ceremony will take place beginning at 4:45 pm at the Senatobia Memorial Cemetery, which is located on Highway 51 South in Senatobia. Reverend John Wilkins, the son of early blues and gospel recording artist Robert Wilkins, will lead a prayer service, after which attendees are invited to join in a group performance of Hemphill’s "Lord Help the Poor and Needy.”
The tombstone was donated in part by the Rodgers Funeral Home in Coldwater, Mississippi, with additional expenses provided by funds raised for funeral expenses following Hemphill’s death.
“By erecting this tombstone we wanted to publicly memorialize the important contributions to north Mississippi blues traditions made by Jessie Mae,” says Olga Wilhelmine Mathus, who founded the Jessie Mae Hemphill Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of north Mississippi music. “Her music was timeless, and we wanted to ensure that people can discover and learn about her music and the musical traditions of her family for generations to come.“
