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Post by AlanB on Mar 19, 2015 5:11:40 GMT -5
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Post by JamesP on Mar 19, 2015 6:07:04 GMT -5
He was indeed a great asset to the history of the Blues. RIP. Rob Ford posted this today:
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Post by AlanB on Mar 19, 2015 7:15:17 GMT -5
I, like Rob, own a set of RR here's another interesting feature from Sam which I scanned 17 years ago in Word for one of the now defunct blues discussion groups. I've concerted it to PDF for ease of reading. Attachments:SearsRoebuck.pdf (84.88 KB)
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Post by JamesP on Mar 19, 2015 11:34:50 GMT -5
I just noticed a unique bit of information in an old Washington Post article by Ann Hornaday, dated December 19, 2013. In 1961, the folk and blues producer Sam Charters and his wife, the future Beat biographer Ann Charters, had just returned from Europe to New York, where they occasionally visited Van Ronk, Sam Charters’s former roommate on MacDougal Street. and a few quotes from Sam Charters from that same article: Sam Charters: [It was] the great golden, shining moment of modern jazz. We went to a little cafeteria on Greenwich Avenue, pay a buck for a beer and there was the original Miles Davis Quintet. Charlie Mingus was playing at the old Five Spot, it was just everywhere in town. Jazz musicians were hanging out with folk musicians, folk musicians were hanging out with painters, everyone was drinking a lot and we felt that we were in this damn thing together. Sam Charters: We were all committed in one way or another. How many demonstrations did we do to get Pete Seeger on TV? It was all part of the view that America should change. We didn’t sing “On Top of Old Smoky” because it was a great song, we sang it because we wanted change. Sam Charters: Bobby (Dylan) was sucking up to everybody. I had published “The Country Blues” in 1959, so I was one of the hot names that Dylan hustled. [When] I started working for Prestige Records, Dylan would show up wanting to play piano. But when he started writing the songs, it was different. Dave and I would drink, we’d hit the Irish whiskey, and around 2 o’clock in the morning, he would start trashing Dylan. But I remember one night he said, “You know, I introduced Dylan at the Gaslight, and he sang “Hard Rain,” and I just went outside and stood in the street and said to myself, ‘None of us wrote that song. He was the one who wrote it.’ And that was it. Dave Van Ronk's jug band, from left, Barry Kornfeld, Sam Charters, Danny Kalb, Dave Van Ronk and Artie Rose, performs at the the Gaslight Cafe, which was located in the basement of 116 MacDougal Street in New York's Greenwich Village on Nov. 8, 1963. (Jack Kanthal/ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Post by AlanB on Mar 27, 2015 1:00:26 GMT -5
I've been hunting for this on my computer and finally found it. Taken in 1975 when Sam was in London. I think the venue was the now defunct Village Bookshop in Regent Street, the photograph was Sylvia Pitcher, her website is well worth a visit. Click to zoom. Attachments:
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Post by JamesP on Mar 27, 2015 13:20:14 GMT -5
Wow Alan, thanks for sharing that website. There are some great pictures of friends in Southwest Virginia...Ralph Stanley, Wayne Henderson, et al.
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