Night Out

Wikipedia: “The Night Time (Is the Right Time)” took on a life of its own more than 25 years later when cast members who played Bill Cosby’s Huxtable family of The Cosby Show lip-synched the song to help celebrate Cliff Huxtable’s parents’ 49th wedding anniversary in 1985 and helped the show become a huge ratings winner.

Common Ground : But Johnson did not sing the blues. He was a religious man who recorded spiritual and religious music. “Dark Was the Night†is a “moan.†A moan is simply a style of wordless singing. And since it is a lament without words, we are left to wonder about the singer’s personal story, experiencing only his pain.

Svein Martin : “I practiced twelve hours a day, every day, until my fingers were bleeding, trying to get the same sound as Elmore James. This went on for weeks and weeks, and finally someone told me, ‘He plays with a slide.’” – Robbie Robertson, at the 1992 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony honoring Elmore James

Howlin’ Wolf : Howlin’ Wolf said “The black people fighting in Vietnam now, when they come back they ain’t going to settle for these little offers and these back-door handouts like they been doing. They ain’t going to take it ’cause they realize they been cheated.”

Blues on Stage : Primer is quoted from Lisa Becker and Bo Trisko’s fantastic liner notes, ‘I wanted Elmore to be recognized for the incredible impact he had on all of us . a new generation will be exposed to Elmore, keeping his style alive.’ Primer seems to have made a personal musical ambition to bring the older blues traditions to a wider, modern audience. Blue Steel (that includes “I had a Dream”) contains authentic down home blues and magnificent slide which the larger labels avoid.

soulwalking : Johnny (Guitar Watson) inherited a guitar from his grandfather, a preacher, on the condition that he did not play the blues on it. He later admitted that ‘that was the first thing I played’. He was listed as Young John Watson when he signed with Federal in 1953. There he recorded ‘Space Guitar’, utilising reverberation and feedback, an unusual technique at the time.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum : A man possessed with a hot temper and enormous strength, Lead Belly spent his share of time in Southern prisons. Convicted on charges of murder (1917) and attempted murder (1930), Lead Belly literally sang his way to freedom, receiving pardons from the governors of Texas and Louisiana.

Okayplayer.com : Ledisi says “I think the best thing is to do it yourself first. Really…I did shop my record [Soulsinger] around and this was right before Jill [Scott] came out. I shopped it around a year before 2000 and I got a lot of nice rejection letters. They were beautiful letters of rejection because they didn’t know what to do with it.”

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