Because I have further thoughts, and I've seen versions with new categories, and also I don't have any other ideas at the moment:
Something to wear: Sugar Pie Desanto - Soulful Dress
A place: The New Vaudeville Band - Finchley Central
Something to drink: John Lee Hooker - One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer
Something to eat: Booker T. & The MGs - ( Read more... )

A Place: Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich - The Legend Of Xanadu (or if you insist on a real place, Bobby Bloom, Montego Bay)
A Food: Millie Small - My Boy Lollipop (or if you want a little more sustenance, Bessie Smith - Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer)
A Drink: UB40 - Red Red Wine
Animal: Smokey Robinson and the Miracles - Mickey's Monkey
( Read more... )

Apparently there is some manifestation of women in popular music being explicit about female sexual pleasure? and wow, there is pulling out of fainting couches and waving of smelling salts.
Like this has never happened before?
Okay, apparently 'dirty blues', popular in the interwar period, had something of a revival in the sixties, was mostly ( Read more... )

Was thinking that when I was a young 'un (and in spite of things like polio, and the so-called 'Asian' flu, and the general prevalence of diseases that anti-vaxxers have forgotten were still a peril within living memory) the Big Threatening Horror was The Bomb -
Four Minutes Warning and then Oblivion, or maybe a radioactive wasteland inhabited by ( Read more... )

So, farewell then, printer which has been with me some dozen or so years, also previous computer.
Take it away Bessie Smith:

Click to view

The usual sturm und drang over setting up the new All In One Computer and the printer which purports to be wireless, but refuses to connect thusly: however it will connect by cable.
Though alas, all the USB ports are on one ( Read more... )

About 'political correctness' and Norbert Elias's theory of the civilising process and the way new canons of behaviour get internalised over time and generations, and when spitting in public became a no-no, and the changes in attitude towards smoking over my life-span, and Erwin Goffmann's ideas about 'onstage' and 'offstage' behaviours, and why ( Read more... )

At a mahvelous party last night, I remarked that 'Get your sausage while it's hot' (which in context was a perfectly innocuous thing to say) could perfectly well constitute a companion piece to Bessie Smith's culinary blues 'No-one in town can bake a sweet jelly roll like mine':

Click to view

I then realised I had not alerted my invisible friends in the plastic ( Read more... )

Having suggested in my post yestereen on the music letter meme apropose of 'Many a New Day', that it was from some unnamed genre which is the opposite of torch song -

Torch songs being, pretty much, the ones in which the female singer yearningly declares that she will never stop Loving That Man even if he is not there/has run off with her best ( Read more... )

Just too late for IBARW:

So horrific are the images conjured up by 'Strange Fruit' that Billie Holiday always performed it with her eyes closed. Caryl Phillips, who used the title for his first play, traces the song's dark history.

Australian novelist Kate Grenville found success with novels about her country's violent history.

International ( Read more... )

Seen in a review of Marybeth Hamilton's In Search of the Blues: Black voices, white visions:
When record companies first marketed race records - music by and for blacks - the singers were women: Mamie Smith and her Hot Jazz Titans, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, Victoria Spivey, Alberta Hunter. According to Hamilton, "nearly every work of blues history" ( Read more... )