... about to bust the stitches

Gather 'round folks and listen as Leroy "Sugarfoot" Bonner of  

Dayton's, Ohio Players tells a tale of skin tight britches. 

You are lying, Uncle John.

                                                         

"Uncle John"
By Tom Rapp

The wind winds the platform
Blows through your suit creases
You want us
To crucify the enemy for Jesus
With your chamber-of-commerce soul
You talk of war so bold
God is on our side, but
He's lost in your wallet-fold

And the widows a-sighing
The children a-crying
The screams of the dying
Say you are lying, Uncle John

You pull out your Sunday God
And hold him up so proud
And say he is with us
To the Applauding crowd
But the burn-blackened place
The shredded disfigured face
Don't say that God is Love
They say that you are Hate

And the widows a-sighing
The children a-crying
The screams of the dying
Say you are lying, Uncle John

You stand up on the platform
With the flag wrapped all around you
And tell us that the Bible says
To fight for it we're bound to
But the Red's for the blood we lose
The White's for the gauze they use
To cover burned-out blackened men
The rest is for the bodies numb and Blue

And the widows a-sighing
The children a-crying
The screams of the dying
Say you are lying, Uncle John

"Prince of Hell" a detail from the right panel of Hieronymous Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510).  Pearls Before Swine used a section of the triptych's right panel for the cover of their 1967 debut One Nation Underground.  Early copies of this record included a poster of the Bosch painting.  The above detail is not featured on the cover but provides an appropriate visual accompaniement for Uncle John, Tom Rapp's scathing indictment of war mongers and their "chamber of commerce souls."  Hell Yes!

The Mouth of Hell (1475), one of the miniature panels painted by Simon Marmion for a manuscript of Visio Tnugdali, a 12th-century religious text  that "tells of the proud and easygoing knight falling unconscious for three days, during which time an angel guides his soul through Heaven and Hell, experiencing some of the torments of the damned. The angel then charges Tnugdalus to well remember what he has seen and to report it to his fellow men. On recovering possession of his body, Tnugdalus converts to a pious life as a result of his experience."  In Hieronymus Bosch. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1973), author Walter S. Gibson notes the similarity of Bosch's "Prince of Hell"  to a "figure in the 12th century Irish religious text Vision of Tundale (Visio Tnugdali), who feeds on the souls of corrupt and lecherous clergy."  Speaking of corrupt and lecherous clergy, the Vatican recently condemned the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.   Identified areas of "concern" include LCRW's "radical feminism." LCRW also openly supports the Occupy Movement.  Perhaps the Vatican believes these "radical feminists" are thinking too independently and focusing too much on war and poverty. Does the Church  judge war and poverty as  having a diminished moral significance when compared with abortion and homosexuality?  Maybe a Vatican visit to the earthly "hell" of life in a warzone or abject poverty might lead them, like Tnugdali, toward the pious life.

 





Jingo Montreux

Bumpo supremo!

Mea Culpa

Mea Culpa is from the excellent 1981 Brian Eno-David Byrne album My Life In the Bush of Ghost

Sisters Love

This is spectacular. 

Former Raelettes put together Sisters Love in the late 1960's. The first song, I Could Never Make is the A side of their 1973 Mowest single.  After a great Don Cornelius interview, Vermettya Royster astounds on a smoking cover of  Curtis Mayfield's Give Me Your Love.  This is without a doubt one of Soul Train's greates moments. 

Heavy Heart

British blues monster Peter Green setting sail for Lysergia.  Heavy Heart was a solo single cut after Green's departure from Fleetwood Mac.  2011 saw the release of The Peter Green Story:  Man of the World a BBC documentary on Green's life, music, and recent comeback. 

The former Peter Allen Greenbaum and his axe.

Messengers Morgan and Gilmore

Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in a unique 1965 lineup that included long time Arkestra member John Gilmore on tenor sax.  Veteran Messenger Lee Morgan is in peak form as is pianist John Hicks and bass man Victor Sproles.  The group's only recording is 'S Make It from late 1964.  Dig it.

 

Bogota Bumpin'

Thanks to the 2007 Soundway  release of Colombia!  The Golden Age of Discos Fuentes - The Powerhouse of Colombian Music 1960-76 I was exposed to the richness of Colombian music.  As the above clip of the Colombian All-Stars on late 70's Bogota television attests, this music cooks.  Featuring the legendary Fruko on bass! 

DIRECTOR - PIANO -JOE AMDRID
PIANOS - JIMMY SALCEDO -MANRRIUCURA
BAJO - JULIO ERNESTO ESTRADA (FRUKO)
TIMBAL -WILSON VIVEROS
CONGA - WILLIE SALCEDO
BONGO - AUGUSTO VILLANUEVA "EL PERUANO"
TROMPETAS - JHON "SASON"GAVIRIA - ADOLFO CASTRO
TROMBONES - GUSTAVO BARROS - EL PANTERA - GILBERTO HERNANDEZ
CANTANTES -PIPER PIMIENTA - JAIRO LICAZALLE - JOE ARROYO - WILSON SAOCO - JUAN PIÑA



Death Letter

Crackers' drummer Levon Helm, R.I.P.

May 26, 1940 – April 19, 2012

Great man laughing. 

Big "Pank"

The man from Turkey Scratch, Arkansas.

Thomas Jive Turkey Friedman

Thomas Friedman is America's number one jive turkey.

JIVE TURKEY

Lion

Beauteous

Luther Ingram

Released by Koko Records in 1972, (If Loving You is Wrong) I Don't Want to Be Right scored Luther Ingram a Number One hit on the R&B charts. 

The live clip of Luther Ingram is from Mel Stuart's concert documentary film Wattstax.  The 1972 Wattstax concert was held at the LA Coliseum seven years after the Watts riots.  To encourage attendance tickets were sold for a dollar each.  Ingram's epic performance is nestled between Rufus Thomas leading the crowd in a mass Funky Chicken and Isaac Hayes laying down the Theme From Shaft. 

The Pretty Things 1971

Pretty Things playing Rain from the album Parachute (1970). 

A record too great to be overlooked.  Pete Tolson is a guitar monster and has recently

 re-recorded Parachute with the xPT's.  Chcck it out.

I Ain't the One

 

Waylon and Jessi on Hee-Haw (1972)



Superstition

Happy Friday the 13th!

"Superstition ain't the way."

Sesame Street 1973!  This seven-year-old bumpschooler

was watching on the black and white.

Grover gets a music lesson.

What is our earthly task, but a worthy design.

From Stereolab's, Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night

Time To Get It Together

Bumpschool Dance Lesson Two: The Bus Stop

(Are You Ready) Do the Bus Stop

Form a line to the front
Form a line to the back

Four to the front
Four to the back
Four to the front
Four to the back
Two to the front
Two to the back
Front back
Left right

Don't stop!

Keep the Groove!

 Nice double feature.  If you want the full Fatback, Bus Stop, Dracula, kung fu experience check out the trailers.

Enter the Dragon

 

Dracula A.D. 1972

"Are you ready?

He's ready.

He's waiting to freak you out,

Right out of this world."

Polyphonic Heartache

Be quiet, big boys don't cry...

Ostara/Easter

 

Christ stepping on a soldier.

14th Century Nottingham alabaster relief.

Ostara (1884) by Johannes Gehrts

Easter (1978) Patti Smith

I am what I want to be - I am a radical



Floyd B. Olson

Longshoreman

Wobbly

 Farmer-Labor Party Governor of the State of Minnesota

 January 6, 1931 – August 22, 1936

 "Now I am frank to say that I am not a liberal. I enjoy working on a common basis with liberals for their platforms, but I am not a liberal. I am what I want to be -  I am a radical.  I am a radical in the sense that I want a definite change in the system.  I am not satisfied with tinkering, I am not satisfied with patching, I am not satisfied with hanging a laurel wreath upon burglars and thieves and pirates and calling them code authorities or something else.  I am not satisfied with that."



Floyd Bjørnstjerne Olson

(November 13, 1891 – August 22, 1936)

"We declare that capitalism has failed and that immediate steps must be taken by the people to abolish capitalism in a peaceful and lawful manner, and that a new, sane, and just society must be established, a system in which all the natural resources, machinery of production, transportation, and communications shall be owned by the government and operated democratically for the benefit of all the people, and not for the benefit of the few."





In his second campaign for Governor of Minnesota,  Floyd B. Olson  won in a four way race with 59% of the vote, taking 82 of the state's 87 counties.  Before, his political career was tragically cut short by stomach cancer at the age of 44, Olson managed to institute a progressive income tax, a social security program for the elderly, guaranteed equal pay for women, a minimum wage law, unemployment insurance, conservation programs, and a guaranteed right to collective bargaining.  He accomplished all of this with a conservative Republican majority in the Minnesota state legislature.  According to his wikipedia entry Olson wanted to legislate state ownership of Minnesota's electric utilities, iron mines, oil fields, grain elevators, and meat packing plants.



Thanks to Thomas Gerald O'Connell for posting his PhD. thesis, Spartacus Educational, and wikipedia. 

Ancient to the Future

The Art Ensemble of Chicago  conjurin'!

From the 1970 film Les Stances a Sophie.

Also from the film,Theme de Yoyo featuring the awesome voice of Fontella Bass. 

Hear it!

The following is from a 1999 interview with the Art Ensemble's Joseph Jarman found on the website Perfect Sound Forever.

Q: Another interesting part of the AEC was the ritualistic aspect, where face paint was used, African drums, I read once you were naked to the waist with just your saxophone...
JJ: I wasn't naked to the waist, I was naked completely! (laughs) Actually, that aspect was explained once as an expression of the various elements of man. For example, Lester would wear a doctor's coat, the scientist, the experimenter. Roscoe was the businessman, the gentleman. I was sort of the shamanistic image coming from various cultures, so was Malachi and [AEC drummer Don] Moye. You know, face painting in non-Western cultures is a sign of collectivism, is a sign of one representing the community, it's not unique at all. But in our society, it's something unique. So what we were doing with that face painting was representing everyone throughout the universe, and that was expressed in the music as well. That's why the music was so interesting. It wasn't limited to Western instruments, African instruments, or Asian instruments, or South American instruments, or anybody's instruments. If we needed a sound [scratches his chair] we'd put a leather chair on stage and scratch it, if that was the only way to get the sound.

 

Fred Jung of the the website All About Jazz interviewed the AEC four years after the passing of founding member Lester Bowie. 

Sock a little Polk Salad to me

Tony Joe White singing about poke sallet.  Tony Joe might want to read this article by Jean Weese of the Alabama Cooperative Extension System.    

 

Abolitionist Quaker Benjamin Lay (1681-1760) crashed a Philadelphia meeting of the slave-owning Quaker leadership with a hollowed out Bible he had filled with blood-red pokeberry juice.  In an act of protest he plunged a sword into the Bible spraying the crowd with fake pokeberry blood.  On another occasion he entered a Quaker meeting dressed as a black man and commenced whipping the assembled Friends. 

Benjamin Lay

A righteous man

Guitar Ascencion

B is for Boise's Built to Spill.

B is for beatific visions.

B is for Beatitudes.

B is for

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Sublime brine

Les Oursins (1958)

In 2001 Yo La Tengo composed a 78 minute instrumental score to accompany the undersea documentary shorts of  influential French avant-garde filmmaker Jean Painleve.  Painlevé (20 November 1902 - 2 July 1989) was a film director, actor, translator, animator, critic and theorist.  

Over the course of his life, Jean Painlevé directed more than two hundred science and nature films.

I Want More

CAN on Top of the Pops in 1976.  I Want More of the

late Michael Karoli's guitar.  A new  box  of unreleased 

 CAN music is due out in June.

                                                       

Diddy Wah Diddy

Gate to Shambhala?

In this extraordinary moment captured on American Bandstand in 1966, Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band open a conduit to Diddy Wah Diddy.  17 year-old Cathy Fletcher must have assumed Dick Clark put her on the Hotline with some teen idol.  The Captain plays along with the pat banter of promo interview speak but then at :50 the needle drops.    The Bandstand dancers are instantly transported into an enchanted reverie.  At 1:00 we see Cathy again and yet something has changed.  Was the Captain laying down a Trust Us incantation on the other end of the line?  We'll never learn the truth but watch this clip and know that the door to Diddy Wah Diddy was opened for a brief moment and all who see and experience Shangri La will never again be the same.

Check out the kid at 1:27!  When it's over he will remember nothing.  His Mom shows up at 1:40 and kicks it like a snake-handler.  Hat girl at 2:10 is off the chain!  Like dervishes the Bandstand gang is lost in the rapture until Dick breaks the hypnosis with a message from Dentyne Gum.  The fissure is sealed, the moment has passed, did it happen?  The tale is in the tape. 

                                                                              

Trust Us
(From Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band's Strictly Personal)

The path is the mask of love a way a way
The flow is the task above today there is no other way 
You gotta trust us when you need a friend
To find us you gotta look within
You gotta trust us before you turn to dust
You gotta see before you see you gotta be before be

(we love you)
You gotta touch without take
You gotta hear without fear
You gotta feel to reveal
You gotta touch without take
Such is is and uh ain't is ain't 

We're for you love you with you love you just a few

We love you we tell you true we love you
The path is youth let the dying die
The path is life yeah; let the lying lie
Let the dying die let the lying lie
(trust trust trust)

Aint no town, aint no city

The original Diddy Wah Diddy was written by Willie Dixon and Ellas McDaniel (Bo Diddley).

This is the 1956 Bo Diddley recording  released on Checker Records.

Mythical Places of the Florida Negro

I.  Diddy-Wah-Diddy

This is the largest and best known of the Negro mythical places.  Its geography is that it is "way off somewhere."  It is reached by a road that curves so much that a mule pulling a wagon-load of fodder can eat off the back of the wagon as he goes.  It is a place of no work and no worry for man and beast.  A very restful place where even the curbstones are good sitting-chairs.  The food is even already cooked.  If a traveller gets hungry all he needs to do is to sit down on the curbstone and wait and soon he will hear something hollering "Eat me!  Eat me!  Eat me!" and a big baked chicken will come along with a knife and fork stuck in its sides.  he can eat all he wants and let the chicken go and it will go on to the next one that needs something to eat.  By that time a big deep sweet potato pie is pushing and shoving to get in front of the traveller with a knife all stuck up in the middle of it so he just cuts a piece off of that and so on until he finishes his snack  Nobody can ever eat it all up.  No matter how much you eat it grows just that much faster.  It is said "Everybody would live in Diddy-Wah-Diddy if it wasn't so hard to find and so hard to get to after you even know the way."  Everything is on a large scale there.  Even the dogs can stand flat-footed and lick crumbs off heaven's tables.  The biggest man there is known as Moon-Regulator because he reaches up and starts and stops it at his convenience.  That is why there are some dark nights when the moon does not shine at all.  He did not feel like putting it out that night.



A Treasury of Southern Folklore

Stories, Ballads, Traditions, and Folkways of the People of the South

Edited with an Introduction by B.A. Botkin

Crown Publishers, 1949 New York, NY p. 479.

 

Oz Garage!

Running Jumping Standing Still have been to Diddy Wah Diddy.

Handsome wiggler Andy Anderson  will help get you there. 

 Is Diddy Wah Diddy in Australia? 

Maenads of the Bacchanal!

The Remains chuggin' A Go-Go.  À gogo is a French expression, it means abundance galore. 

Yes indeed, you will find it in Diddy Wah Diddy.

 



R. Crumb's Mr. Natural  warily refuses to divulge

the "meaning" of Diddy Wah Diddy.  From the cover

of the first Zap Comix (1968)

 

Blind Blake with a different take.

 For Blind Blake, Diddie Wa Diddie is something other than a place. 

Blake recorded this in 1929 or `30.  For Blake the abundance of

Diddie Wa Diddie speaks to something of a more carnal nature. 

Diddie Wa Diddie

There’s a great big mystery
and it sure is worryin’ me
it’s Diddie Wa Diddie,
it’s Diddie Wa Diddie
I wish somebody would tell me what Diddie Wa Diddie means

That little girl ‘bout four feet four
go on poppa n’ and gimme some more
of the old Diddie Wa Diddie
the old Diddie Wa Diddie
I wish somebody would tell me what Diddie Wa Diddie means

I went out and walked around
Somebody yelled, said “Look who’s in town”
Mister Diddie Wa Diddie
Mister Diddie Wa Diddie
I wish somebody would tell me what Diddie Wa Diddie means

Went to church put my hat on the seat
Lady sat on it, said “Daddy you sure are sweet
Mister Diddie Wa Diddie
Mister Diddie Wa Diddie
I wish somebody would tell me what Diddie Wa Diddie means

I said “Sister I’ll soon be gone,
Just gimme that thing you sittin’ on
My Diddie Wa Diddie
My Diddie Wa Diddie
I wish somebody would tell me what Diddie Wa Diddie means

Then I got put out of church
cuz I talk about Diddie Wa Diddie too much
Mister Diddie Wa Diddie
Mister Diddie Wa Diddie
I wish somebody would tell me what Diddie Wa Diddie means