Listen up in Illinois

Blues fans in Central Illinois will have  chance to listen to Crescent City Blues, the second hour of our series this coming Saturday night, March 26.  At 8 p.m., WUIS 91.9 FM in Springfield, and WIPA 89.3 FM in Pittsfield will feature the documentary on their program “Saturday Beat.” WUIS says that show features an “ever-changing inventory of music documentaries, concert recordings and tribute programs.”

WUIS is the NPR station at the University of Illinois at Springfield. WIPA is its translator station for listeners an hour to the west. Both stations aired our first hour last weekend.

Out-of-towners can listen online at wuis.org.

Check out WWOZ’s Community Stage

If you’re in New Orleans’ French Quarter March 5, check out the debut of the WWOZ Community Stage at the French Market. The community radio station describes the venue as a place for “local street musicians… to earn exposure and tips.” The stage will be in tent at the Farmers Market flagpole, between Ursuline and Governor Nicholls streets, marked by  banners.

Playing from 2:00 to 2:45 will be blues guitarist John T. Lewis, whom we featured in Crescent City Blues, along with harmonica player J.D. Hill. Here’s a video we made of Lewis and Hill playing together in Hill’s living room last fall. (Scroll to the bottom of the page.)

The March 5 schedule is here. More on the Community Stage here.

A Boston icon airs our series

Boston-based WUMB 91.9 FM, one of the foremost folk and roots radio stations in the country, aired both hours of Still Singing the Blues last Sunday evening, Feb. 20. This is great visibility for Louisiana blues artists. WUMB, which is based at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, reaches 275 cities and towns in eastern and central Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire.  Besides the Boston flagship, it broadcasts from stations in Falmouth, Newburyport, Worcester, and Orleans.

This is a station that takes music seriously. It sponsors the WUMB Boston Music Festival, two music camps each summer, and guitar clinics through the year. And it features, in live on-air performances, 250 musicians a year.

Listen up, Warm Springs

If you’re in the vicinity of Warm Springs, Oregon, be sure to catch the broadcast of our series on KWSO 91.9 FM. Part 1, Still Singing the Blues, will air Wednesday, Feb. 23 at 11 p.m. Part 2, Crescent City Blues, will air Saturday, Feb. 26 at 7 p.m. and again Wednesday, March 2, at 11 p.m.

KWSO is run by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, whose land stretches “from the snowcapped summit of the Cascade Mountains to the palisaded cliffs of the Deschutes River in Central Oregon.” Our documentary will be aired by DJ Donna Wainawit on her weekly “Honky Tonk Hour.” (The Wednesday show is a rebroadcast.) Says the station’s web site, “You never know what DJ Donna will play but it’s always something that would sound good at a honky tonk!”

KWSO does not webcast, so this one’s for locals.

Reporting on the oil spill

Donald and Theresa Dardar, who live in the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe Community, used to have woods in their back yard. Now it's open water. Photo by Barry Yeoman.

Technically, this post is not about the blues, although these stories are about South Louisiana and might make some folks blue. We like to think that, by doing good reporting, we are bringing a little hope and light into the world, though.

We (Barry Yeoman and Richard Ziglar) have been hired by KRVS 88.7 FM, the public radio station in Lafayette, Louisiana, to provide reporting on the BP oil spill.

We will publish these stories (at least a dozen) on the Public Media Exchange website. This reporting is part of a larger project called GulfWatch, which is being administered by Louisiana Public Broadcasting and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

These stories are in no way affiliated with the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. The links below are provided through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s GulfWatch News Consortium through Louisiana Public Broadcasting’s Public Media Exchange at publicmediaexchange.org.

Vietnamese Fishermen Search for the Monetary Value of a Lost Culture
Kenneth Feinberg, the Boston attorney in charge of reviewing claims for the BP oil spill, says he expects to start paying interim and final claims later this month. But as Louisiana’s Vietnamese-American fishing community has learned, some losses are harder to quantify than others—especially when what’s at stake is a way of life.

Pointe-au-Chien Indians, Reeling From the Oil Spill, Watch as Their Land Washes Away
The 700-member Pointe-au-Chien indian tribe south of Houma, Louisiana was one of the first communities to take a direct hit from the BP oil spill. For them, the disaster is ongoing—and part of a larger threat to their ancestral home.

Future stories will be posted at http://www.publicmediaexchange.org, and there will be links from http://www.barryyeoman.com/gulfwatch.html.

Rue Boogaloo

Rue Boogaloo Radio by marty christian

A musical interlude today. The first hour our our series features the extraordinary 77-year-old blues diva Carol Fran of Lafayette. Often accompanying Carol these days are Marty Christian and Andy Cornett, who also have their own band, Rue Boogaloo. They call their music “that Southwest Louisiana sound—full of soulful dance grooves that are drenched in blues.” Here’s a sample.

Resurrection

Mother-in-Law Lounge. Photo by Barry Yeoman

In Crescent City Blues and in the pages of this blog, we’ve chronicled the ups and downs of New Orleans’ famous Mother-in-Law Lounge. Founded by singer Ernie K-Doe and his wife Antoinette K-Doe in 1994, it was a cozy space full of K-Doe memorabilia that became a second living room for many of the city’s R&B musicians and fans.

Kermit Ruffins. Photo by Elliott Hammer, reprinted under a Creative Commons license.

The Mother-in-Law survived Ernie’s death in 2001, then Hurricane Katrina in ’05, then Antoinette’s death in ’09. But last month Antoinette’s daughter Betty Fox closed the lounge, saying she could no longer afford to keep it going. The final show, we’ve been told, was joyful, nostalgic, and a bit heartbreaking at the end. Musician John T. Lewis wrote to us, “No one seemed to have the ability to leave. Betty put us stragglers out at 1:30 a.m., long after everybody else had left. We all forgot we were leaving. Didn’t seem to be any doors and no one cared.”

We have learned never to assume any change is permanent in New Orleans. Today’s Times-Picayune carried the news that trumpeter Kermit Ruffins will lease the site of the Mother-in-Law, on Claiborne Avenue in Treme, and a new bar will open there. It might even keep the Mother-in-Law name. Reported Keith Spera, “Ruffins and the building’s owner have agreed on terms for a longterm lease and expect to sign paperwork by early next week, Ruffins said. He hopes to open by Mardi Gras.”

The article continued:

“I jumped on it before anyone else did,” he said Thursday.

Ruffins has a month-to-month lease on the nearby Sidney’s Saloon, where he sometimes performs. He is a hands-off owner. He books the occasional band, but mostly leaves the day-to-day operation to a manager.

He anticipates a similar arrangement at his new bar. “I’m going to have as much live music as I can,” he said.

What about the incredible murals that adorn every side of the building, painted by artist Daniel Fuselier over seven years?

Regardless of what Ruffins names the new bar, he intends to leave the murals in place.

“I can’t mess up that beautiful artwork,” he said. “The outside is going to stay the same.”

A father figure and a mysterious fire

Today we’ve posted another audio clip, this one from Alabama Slim, a native of Vance, Alabama who now lives in New Orleans and performs sometimes with his close friend and distant cousin Little Freddie King. Slim was one of the first bluesmen I met even before we received funding for this project. I heard him play guitar and sing at Checkpoint Charlie, a bar and laundromat outside the French Quarter, where legless mannequins sport Mardi Gras beads and the resident housecat eats from a martini glass on the bar. Slim played the first set with street musicians Slewfoot and Cary B, along with the superb clarinetist Nervous Duane. It was a lively set of straight-up blues. Then, in the second set, there was an unannounced appearance by King himself, who added his own highly-charged raw country-blues sound.

L-R: Alabama Slim, Cary B, Slewfoot, Nervous Duane at Checkpoint Charlie. Photo by Barry Yeoman.

The occasion was a visit by Tim Duffy, founder and director of the North Carolina-based Music Maker Relief Foundation, a group that aids “the true pioneers and forgotten heroes of Southern music.” Music Maker provides financial assistance, cuts records, and arranges gigs for musicians who are 55 and older, rooted in a Southern musical tradition, and earning less than $18,000 a year.

My visit to Checkpoint Charlie provided the initial inspiration for this documentary series. It also inspired Truckin’ My Blues Away, an hour-long radio doc about Duffy, King, and three other Music Maker artists. Richard Ziglar and I produced Truckin’ in early 2010 for AARP’s Prime Time Radio.

Alabama Slim was born in 1939; his father built trains at the Pullman plant and his mother was a domestic. He learned the blues from his parents’ old 78s. Here’s a little more, in Slim’s own words, from Music Makers’ web site:

I grew up listening to the old blues since I was a child. I spent summers with my grandparents who had a farm. Them old folks would get to moanin’ while they worked, and I just started moanin’ with them. That’s where I learned to sing. When I got grown I formed a band and we played little juke joints in the ’50s and ’60s. In ’65, I came to New Orleans after Hurricane Betsy.  Got me a job with a moving company and then one making cooking oil. My cousin Freddie King was drinking hard in those days, and I was too. We jammed every once in awhile. By the time the ’80s rolled around I was not doing much but Freddie always checked on me. By the ’90s I got myself together and we have been the best of friends ever since, tighter than brothers really; there is not a day that goes by when we do not speak or see each other.

In the three-minute audio clip we posted here, Slim talks about the song “Mr. Charlie,” which you can download here for 99 cents from iTunes (or you can download the entire CD, The Mighty Flood, for $9.99). It’s a tale of the father figure who took young Slim under wing, and of a mysterious fire.

Click here to listen to Slim’s story.

‘Crème de la crème of deep soul’

On our Meet the Musicians page, we have posted a new excerpt from our interview with New Orleans R&B singer C.P. Love. Love talks about performing in Port Sulphur, Louisiana, during the years of segregation. Port Sulphur is located in Plaquemines Parish, the area south of New Orleans that was historically synonymous with Louisiana racism. As Barry wrote in an unrelated article, “For many years, the kingpin of politics in this delta parish was judge and district attorney Leander Perez, a hardcore segregationist who converted an abandoned fort in the tidal swamps—infested with mosquitoes, rattlesnakes, and water moccasins—into a jail for civil-rights activists. Though Perez has been dead for four decades, his legacy is not forgotten here.” The blues always has a social and racial context, and this two-minute clip is a reminder.

Here’s some more about C.P. Love—excerpts from a history of his recordings on the web site Sir Shambling’s Deep Soul Heaven, with some musical offerings too:

Carrollton Pierre Love was born in New Orleans on 1 May 1945, and raised in the city on its jazz and R & B roots. He was playing with pro bands by the time he was 16. He first cut for Earl King and Elijah Walker’s King Walk label in the ’60s, with the deep You Call The Shots (below) being his first great performance. This cut featured his high clear baritone over a dead slow NOLA rhythm, pumping piano and big horns.

 
In the early ’70s he was one of the Crescent City artists who joined Wardell Quezergue’s conveyor belt to Malaco in the wake of the phenomenal successes of Jean Knight and King Floyd. And it is not a big exaggeration to say that his Chimneyville 45 I Found All These Things (below) outshone all the other tracks cut in Jackson in the early ’70s. This really is the crème de la crème of deep soul—Wardell’s lush strings and Jerry Puckett’s tasteful guitar fills are a perfect backdrop for Love’s voice on this dead slow ballad.

 
It took until 1985 for him to record again. The delicate tasteful ballad Spiritual Love (below) is clearly an ’80s recording but traditional enough in style to please old school fans like me.C.P. returned on wax in a more traditional New Orleans setting as the featured singer with Hiram Armstrong’s NOLA Jazz Band, as well as cutting a solo set of covers in the ’80s for Southland. These tracks showcased his regular performances in the French Quarter and were no doubt sold to the tourists who thronged there. Rather better though were the cuts on a 12” single on his own label and a CD released by Carlo Ditta on his Orleans imprint. These were mostly cut during a spell on the West Coast. My personal favorite of all these later recordings were the self-penned sunshine island sound of “To The Good Music” with its lovely reggae lilt and his impassioned rendition of Otis’ “My Lover’s Prayer.”

Blanketing South Dakota like the snow

Weather forecasts in South Dakota call for snow these next few days. But snow won’t be the only thing blanketing The Mount Rushmore State in the New Year.

On Jan. 1, South Dakota Public Broadcasting will broadcast “Still Singing the Blues” at 11 p.m. It will air “Crescent City Blues” Jan. 8 at 11 p.m. Descended from one of the oldest educational radio stations in the country (the now-silent KUSD-AM, licensed in 1922), South Dakota Public Broadcasting has evolved into a network of nine stations and ten translators that cover the 77,000-square-mile state. It broadcasts out of the University of South Dakota’s campus in Vermillion and produces 40 hours of local programming every week. It is also affiliated with NPR.

For a list of stations and frequencies, click here. Or listen live at sdpb.org/radio.