Tag: Lottie Kimbrough

  • Grass for pillow: early Japanese travel poems

    Grass for pillow: early Japanese travel poems

    Last year Penguin published a selection of classical Japanese writings about travel.  Travels with a writing brush, edited by the Australian translator Meredith McKinney, didn’t receive much attention at the time, but it’s a wonderful and wonderfully varied introduction to poetry and prose written in Japan between the seventh and seventeenth centuries.  For anyone who’s…

  • Blues recordings: gwallter’s top 10

    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,…