Tag: country blues
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Poor boy long ways from home
Has a song title ever said so much in so few words? This one has the reputation of being one of the oldest blues songs. That’s a claim that’s hard to substantiate, but this song certainly has a long history, and it’s still alive and well today. ‘Poor boy long ways from home’, often shortened…
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Blues recordings: gwallter’s top 10
Richard ‘Rabbit’ Brown, James Alley blues, 1927 James Alley is in New Orleans. Like Louis Armstrong Brown was a native of the Storyville district of that city. He only recorded six songs, but this one, recorded in his home town, is a peach. Brown was already in his late forties when he sang it,…
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John Fahey, American primitive?
Like many teenagers of the late 1960s I was first awakened to what would become my most treasured music by the late John Peel. His weekly programme Top Gear on Radio One was unmissable. It was almost the only place you could come across American musicians ignored by the mainstream (Peel had worked on a…