Bues on a Saturday: Junior Wells: Hoodoo Man Blues

Circa 1966, probably on a European tour, Junior Wells performs his "Hoodoo Man Blues." The LP features Buddy Guy on guitar. This video seems to feature the left-handed Otis Rush and is tkane at a slower tempo.

RIP Duck Dunn and Chuck Brown

Donald "Duck" Dunn, bassist for Booker T. and the MGs, Stax studio ace who played with many of the greats of rock, soul, and blues died over the weekend. He was featured in the Blues Brothers movies. One of my favorites was his playing on Fathers and Sons, the Chess double LP that featured Muddy Waters and other Chicago blues veterans with up and comers Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield. Naturally, they picked Duck to play bass.

 Check out his website, wikipedia entry, and allmusic.com bio. 

I love this early 1960s clip of the Booker T. hit "Green Onions" espeically how animated Duck is. The camera focuses on him during Steve Cropper's guitar solo.



Chuck Brown's death, also this weekend, will attract only a fraction of the notice given to Dunn's passing. Brown, a fixture on the DC music scene for decades, was known as the "godfather of go-go" was an immensely creative musician, guitarist, singer and bandleader. I've never quite understood why "go-go" never caught on the way rap did.

Here is Brown's website (down at the moment), wikipedia entry , allmusic.com pages, and Stephen Crocket's tribute in the Washington Post tribute.

Here is a video of his big hit "We Need Some Money"

 

Zombie Ayn Rand

HT Taner Edis at The Secular Outpost

Cinco de Mayo: an American Tradition

The Cinco de Mayo holiday dates from the Civil War era and was first embraced in California. UCLA professor David Hayes-Bautista is the author of "El Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition."




 In Spanish


 

 According to a news release from UCLA

In the process of extracting Latino demographic data from nearly a dozen Spanish-language newspapers published in California since the 1850s, UCLA professor David Hayes-Bautista stumbled upon the answer to a question that for years had puzzled scholars and amateur historians alike: Why is Cinco de Mayo — a holiday commemorating the Mexican victory over the French at the battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862 — so widely celebrated in California and the United States, when it is scarcely observed in Mexico?

As Hayes-Bautista explains in "El Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition" (University of California Press), his new book on the origins of the holiday, which publishes May 5, Cinco de Mayo isn't Mexican at all.

Rather, it is an American holiday, rooted in the Civil War era and commemorated today because a network of Latino groups in California known as the juntas patrióticas mejicanas (Mexican patriotic assemblies) deliberately created a public memory of it

Blues on a Saturday: Nina Simone "Backlash Blues"

With lyrics by Langston Hughes