Sisters, 1971



Irma Thomas, We Won't Be In Your Way Anymore.
Carole King, It's Too Late.
Lynn Anderson, Rose Garden.
Loretta Lynn, One's On The Way.
Jean Knight, Mr. Big Stuff.
Vicki Anderson, I'm Too Tough For Mr. Big Stuff (Hot Pants).
Honey Cone, Want Ads.
Merry Clayton, Southern Man.
Ruth Copeland, Play With Fire.
Joni Mitchell, Little Green.
Betty Wright, Clean Up Woman.
Bonnie Raitt, Women Be Wise.
Shirley Bassey, Diamonds Are Forever.
Mary Lou Williams, What's Your Story, Morning Glory?
The Joy of Cooking, Brownsville/Mockingbird.
Esther Phillips, I'm Getting 'Long Alright.

In New York, in the summer of 1971, most of her friends have gone out of town. So Diane Arbus stays in her tiny apartment with its view of the Hudson (one envied by her neighbors). She haunts the Walker Evans exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, goes to movies in the afternoon. A former classmate sees Arbus slumped in a seat at the 68th Street Playhouse, but the classmate, depressed herself, avoids talking to her.

Arbus has already established her name (MoMA has bought some of her photos) but her finances are a mess. She spent the past spring sparring with Harper's over an expenses claim. She picks up a few assignments--fashion shows, Tricia Nixon's wedding, a black separatist minster in Detroit, Hortense Calisher's latest author photo (Calisher has the shots destroyed). Arbus has, as she has for decades, found her art in photographing her menagerie of freaks: the misshapen, the distorted, those who hate their bodies, those who bear them like scarred trophies. Eddie Carmel, the "Jewish giant" of the Bronx, or a New Jersey housewife who makes her pet macaque wear a baby's bonnet and snowsuit, or an albino sword-swallower. The latter is the subject of one of Arbus' last photographs--she stands before a carnival tent, her arms outstretched, the sword half down her throat. The sword's hilt and the swallower's body each make a crucifix.

"Lately it's been striking me how I really love what I can't see in a photograph," Arbus tells her students in what will be the last photography class she teaches. She lingers on "the element of actual physical darkness...it's very thrilling to see darkness again."



In 1971 the radio is full of women. They ring across every narrow band, with songs of reckonings and negotiations. A marriage ends early one morning, cloud-strained daylight falling across the kitchen table. Another ends late one night with a call from a phone booth. In Irma Thomas' "We Won't Be In Your Way Anymore," we never hear Thomas' husband as he surveys his empty home--maybe he's stunned, or screaming. Thomas just dissects the marriage (disclosing she's been beaten in the last verse), tells him where his wallet and keys are, lets him know the kids will be all right now. "You done me wrong, you done us wrong," she sings at the fadeout. Those are her final words to him: her phone call lasts only as long as the record. (Two Phases of Irma Thomas)

Carole King's "It's Too Late," played everywhere that summer, answers "One Fine Day," which King co-wrote when she was 21. The wedding photos are in boxes in the closet, the only conversations left are vague reminiscences about when they first met. Old friends' names come up as punchlines to forgotten jokes. The woman wakes one morning and knows she can't play her part anymore, though she tries to cushion the blow. King's piano chords slam close each verse, and finally the song. It's a wintry contrast to the ebullient piano line with which King had opened the Chiffons' track: innocence at last bows to experience. (Tapestry).


Pat Nixon at work in the White House, ca. 1971

In early 1971 Lynn Anderson's "Rose Garden" tops the pop and country charts; its rhinestone arrangement and dancing melody make it fit for a Nixon White House social. Yet its lyric is blunt as it is wise, sung by a wife standing her ground, brokering her humanity. As with other songs hanging in the air that year, it can be ground down to a single line: It doesn't have to be this way; it won't be this way any longer.(16 Greatest Hits.)

Gloria Steinem, interviewing Pat Nixon on the campaign plane during the '68 election, had asked Nixon who her greatest influences had been when she was growing up. Who had she identified with?

Pat Nixon, born in a Nevada mining town, had lost her mother to cancer and her father to silicosis before she was 18. She had made it through the Depression taking any job she could find--as a cashier, an X-ray tech, sweeping floors in a bank. She and her husband had clawed out of the hole with their fingernails; she had endured the humiliation of having her husband beg for his VP slot on national television, and she would endure worse in August 1974, smiling while her husband boarded a helicopter home to California. So Pat Nixon looked at Steinem, took her measure, drew a breath. "I never had time to dream about being someone else," she said. "I had to work."

Loretta Lynn's "One's On the Way" is on All Time Greatest Hits.



New Woman magazine hires Arbus to shoot Germaine Greer, who has recently helped to pummel Norman Mailer in a debate over feminism. Greer opens the door of her Chelsea Hotel room to see "a rosepetal-soft delicate girl" struggling with her camera equipment. Greer, six feet tall and imperious, has sympathy. Yet once she's set up, Arbus commands Greer to lie flat upon her hotel bed, and nearly slams her wide-angle lens into Greer's face. She baits Greer, asks intrusive, personal questions, snaps the shutter whenever Greer tenses or snaps out an answer. So Greer makes her face a mask. "It was tyranny. Really tyranny," Greer later told Patricia Bosworth. "But because [Arbus] was a woman I didn't tell her to fuck off. If she'd been a man, I'd have kicked her in the balls." The session's a failure: New Woman rejects the photos.

Also in the Chelsea Hotel while Arbus wars with Greer: Harry Smith, in Room 705, playing Skip James 78s for a visiting monk; Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern, stumbling out onto 23rd Street convinced that it's Sunday; Patti Smith, a scrawny kid hanging out in the lobby. Radios and hi-fis, their voices barely muffled by the walls, carry the news: the swagger-beat of Jean Knight's "Mr. Big Stuff"; its muddy, impenetrable answer record by Vicki Anderson; the modern girl group hit "Want Ads," where the singers, hardened by betrayal, saunter back into the market (the line "going to the evening news" sounds like "going to the interviews," a finer, colder phrase, with sex becoming just another job) (Soulful Sugar).

Merry Clayton, born in Louisiana, makes Neil Young's "Southern Man" a damnation, singing the three syllables of "suh-thern-MAN" like three downward thrusts of a knife. Ruth Copeland turns the Stones' "Play With Fire" on its head. The original has Mick Jagger in his typical '60s role, a rake taunting a slumming upper-class girl. Now Copeland's working-class girl, her family still back in the coal mines, slowly rips her would-be seducer to bloody tatters. (Invictus Sessions.)



It was the height of the suicide years. Mark Rothko in 1970, John Berryman hurling himself off the Washington Avenue Bridge in 1972, Anne Sexton sitting in her garage two years later. Shelley Broaday, a photographer who lived in Arbus' building, leaped off the roof in spring 1971. Pills and drink, the neighbors said. The kids living down the hall from Arbus begin writing songs about suicides--they had already known a few.

The songs keep coming, filling the spaces. Joni Mitchell, mourning a child she gave up for adoption, imagining the life she would have no hand in forming, asserts that "you're sad and you're sorry but you're not ashamed." (Blue). Shirley Bassey, in the theme song of a dreadful new James Bond film, casts her lot with money (Diamonds Are Forever OST). Betty Wright rues that she neglected her man enough to let another woman poach him (I Love The Way You Love); Bonnie Raitt, reviving a Sippie Wallace blues (Raitt used Wallace as her lodestar in those years), offers hard wisdom while she readies to pounce (s/t).



Sometime--morning, late at night--on 26 July 1971, Diane Arbus lies down, clothed, in her bathtub after taking an overdose of barbiturates, and slashes her wrists. Up on the roof, the kids are listening to the Apollo 15 launch. Arbus has two daughters. She is forty-eight. Her journal's last entry, on 7/26: "The Last Supper." The last person to have seen her alive was Walter Silver, who saw her on the street carrying a flag. There's a persistent rumor that Arbus had set her camera up to shoot her in the tub.

Only a few people went to Arbus' funeral in early August. Most of her friends were away for the summer, and they didn't hear the news until they came back to the city. Richard Avedon, an old friend, did make it, and he was heard saying he wished he could've been an artist like her. And his old friend Frederick Eberstradt allegedly whispered back: "No you don't."



It shouldn't end there. End it with jubilation, whether in Mary Lou Williams reviving "What's the Story Morning Glory?"(Nite Life), or the Berkeley-based collective The Joy of Cooking. "Goin' to Brownsville/gonna take that right-hand road," hymn Toni Brown and Terri Garthwaite. Or end it with resilience, with Esther Phillips' "I'm Getting 'Long Alright" (Confessin' the Blues).

Top: Diane Arbus, "Germaine Greer, Feminist In Her Hotel Room," 1971.

Many details taken from Howard Sounes' Seventies and especially Patricia Bosworth's Diane Arbus: A Biography.

What Now?

"If this prologue goes on much longer, it will be 1972."

Anonymous wit, on the previous post.

So, yes, after making a big deal about reviving the site and changing direction, etc., I stop posting again. This is owed to a number of reasons, including lack of inspiration and work-related exhaustion, but primarily it's because Blogger has made it quite clear that this site is getting axed if there's one more music "infraction."

I mean, when they delete Keep the Coffee Coming, of all people, it's a sign that MP3 blogging is really not viable any more, on Blogger at least. It was a good run, really, and it lasted far longer than I expected.

So what now? I'm really not sure. I'd like to keep this place up, if solely as a repository for the old stuff, and I hope to keep doing some early '70s related stuff, possibly as Youtube links, or other things. For now, if you're desperate for my writing and dig Bowie in the slightest, check out my other site.

C.O.

1971: A Prologue, Starring Richard Nixon



Rod Stewart, Amazing Grace.
John Fahey, Amazing Grace.

I would like to leave a renewed conviction in America that the system does work, that democratic government is better than the alternatives, that reforms can be made through peaceful change...In a sense it's all right here in this room, right here in this chair. Whoever is President of the United States, and what he does, is going to determine the kind of world we have.

Pres. Richard Nixon, to Allen Drury, 1 April 1971.

Star of show--square type--named Archie. Hippy son-in-law...The show was a total glorification of homosex. Made Arch look bad, homos look good. Is this common on TV? Destruction of civilization to build homos. Made the homos as the most attractive type. Followed Hee Haw.

Nixon to H.R. Haldeman, ca. late May 1971, the morning after Nixon watched "All In the Family" for the first time.

We've checked and found out that 96 percent of the bureaucracy are against us; they're bastards and they're here to screw us...You've got to realize the press aren't interested in liking you; they're only interested in news or screwing me.

Nixon, speaking at a full Cabinet meeting, 29 June 1971.

You hear a lot of stuff around that the U.S. is not to be trusted with power. You hear that our presidents lie us into wars. You hear that the U.S. is imperial and aggressive. But we build up our enemies after wars, and we ask not for one acre. What will we get for ourselves after Vietnam? Nothing.

If we retreat from the world scene, who's left? With all our stupidity, with all our impetuousness, what other nation in the world is as idealistic than the United States?

Nixon at the first meeting of his Productivity Commission, 29 June.

Washington is full of Jews...Most Jews are disloyal...Bob, generally speaking, you can't trust the bastards. They turn on you. Am I wrong or right?

Nixon to Haldeman, 3 July 1971. (At the end of the conversation, Nixon sent out a presidential order to a staff member to see how many Jews were in the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

He has to realize he can't stay forever. We may have on our hands here a man who will pull down the temple with him, including me. I don't think he would want to. I mean he considers himself a patriot, but he now sees himself, as McCarthy did, and perhaps Agnew now does, he sees himself as the issue, rather than the issue, which is the great weakness of any political man.

Nixon to John Ehrlichman, discussing J. Edgar Hoover, 25 October 1971.

"Amazing Grace": from Every Picture Tells a Story and Fahey's America. All quotes are from Richard Reeves' President Nixon: Alone In the White House. Top: Nixon meets Pierre Trudeau, December 1971.

The Organization Ain't Really Organized, 1970



John Ashbery, Song.
The Insect Trust, Be a Hobo/Hoboken Saturday Night.
Ornette Coleman Quartet, Forgotten Songs.
Bruce Cockburn, Going To the Country.
Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Bellerin' Plain.
Neil Young, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (TV rehearsal).
Alice Cooper, Beautiful Flyaway.
The Kinks, Get Back In the Line.
Elaine Stritch and cast of Company, The Little Things You Do Together.
Tim Rose, I've Gotta Get a Message To You.
The Street People, Jennifer Tomkins.
Freda Payne, Band of Gold (alternate take).
Mavis Staples, Chained.
Roebuck "Pops" Staples, Black Boy.
Johnnie Mandel, Suicide Is Painless.
Antônio Carlos Jobim, Amparo.
Miles Davis, Sanctuary.
William Walton, Improvisations On an Impromptu Of Benjamin Britten: moderato.
John Cale, Gideon's Bible.
Donovan, Riki Tiki Tavi.

The Sixties ended badly everywhere...But if the Sixties seemed at last to pass unmourned and with few enduring monuments, this was perhaps because the changes that they did bring about were so all-embracing as to seem natural and, by the early Seventies, wholly normal. At the start of the decade Europe was run by and--as it seemed--for old men...Yet within ten years the old men (Churchill, Adenauer, De Gaulle) were dead.

Tony Judt, Postwar.

On that cold Wednesday morning, Rothko's assistant Oliver Steindecker came to work as usual at nine o'clock. He unlocked the door to the studio on 69th Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side and called out a robust "good morning" as he did every day. But on this morning there was no answer. Steindecker went to Rothko's bed, which he discovered to be empty. He searched everywhere, finally going to the section where the kitchen and bath were located, to find Rothko lying on the floor beside the sink, covered in blood, with both of his arms slit open and a razor blade by his side...The autopsy showed that aside from the deep incisions, the artist had also suffered acute poisoning from anti-depressants. He was 69 years old.

Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Mark Rothko 1903-1970: Pictures as Drama.


Rothko, Untitled (Black on Grey), 1969/1970.

The song tells us of our old way of living,
Of life in former times. Fragrance of florals,
How things merely ended when they ended,
Of beginning again into a sigh. Later,

Some movement is reversed and the urgent masks
Speed toward a totally unexpected end
Like clocks out of control. Is this the gesture
That was meant, long ago, the curving in

Of frustrated denials, like jungle foliage
And the simplicity of the ending all to be let go
In quick, suffocating sweetness? The day
Puts toward a nothingness of sky...

John Ashbery, "Song," from The Double Dream of Spring, 1970.


Times Square, ca. 1970.

Our story resumes in New York City in 1970, a city divested by its country. Once the United States' collective aspiration, New York has become the broken compact, an easy shorthand for the news-magazines, used to stand for blight, crime, general menace. Worse, it's come to represent The City itself, and the U.S., which still has a farmer's narrow soul, wants nothing more than to be rid of it.

Life in NYC, ungovernable and forsaken, goes on as it has for much of its history. Its recently-acquired intaglio of decay and menace provide one small benefit---it drives off the speculators and keeps the monied class within its confines. So for some twenty years you could be an artist and actually live in Manhattan.

Or across the river, where in a decaying Hoboken apartment building live a collective of musicians called The Insect Trust. Most are from Memphis: one, the clarinetist/historian Robert Palmer, is photographed sitting on what seems to be a milk jug--behind him Hoboken looks like a medieval French town but for the telephone lines. Another shot has the guitarist Bill Barth wrapped in a quilt, peering out the window as if the house is surrounded by policemen.

"Be a Hobo" is the Trust's version of a chant by Louis "Moondog" Hardin, who in 1970 could be found standing on 54th St., usually dressed as a Viking. "Hoboken Saturday Night," the Trust's ode to minor rowdy pleasures, is sung by Nancy Jeffries, whose voice is that of a dedicated enthusiast, of a woman who, suddenly taken by a song she's hearing, sings her way into it.

The two tracks lead off Hoboken Saturday Night. The band broke apart soon afterward: Trevor Koehler, a saxophonist/flutist who worked with Gil Evans, killed himself in 1976; Palmer, who died in 1997, wrote Deep Blues and helped create PBS' 1995 Rock and Roll (still the best rock documentary ever made, still shamefully unavailable (though pieces of it are finally turning up)); Barth became a painter in Amsterdam and died in 2000; Jeffries went into the record industry and signed Suzanne Vega, Deee-lite and Freedy Johnston.



In 1970 Ornette Coleman lived in a loft on 131 Prince Street, in Soho, that he soon would offer up as a practice space and performance hall. Early in the year Coleman and some of his longtime collaborators put on a show for his neighbors: one of the songs, "Friends and Neighbors," featured everyone in the audience singing along while Coleman brutally interrogated a fiddle.

"Forgotten Songs," a fanfare and call to arms, is from the same session--recorded on Valentine's Day, 1970, at 131 Prince St., with Dewey Redman (ts), Charlie Haden (b) and Ed Blackwell (d); on the now out-of-print Friends and Neighbors. (In 2006, a co-op at 131 Prince sold for $1.5 million.)


John and Yoko survey the estate, 1970.

There is so much light here--his life force pulling us all together, letting himself finally touch; the gentle eyes of the people Van and I love so much smiling...Look at the photographs and marvel, as we do, at the good feeling that radiates from [Van] now--to you all with love...

Janet Planet, liner notes to Van Morrison's His Band and the Street Choir.

So if the city was evil and irredeemable, it's no surprise that the age-old dream of the pastoral had returned. (Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, at the end of the decade, snorted that he preferred the new disco to all the Sixties "country" music that "tried to take us back and make us better than we are"). The record sleeves of 1970 are littered with contented, stoned rock singers posing with their doting hippie wives/girlfriends and their scattered, bewildered children, all standing in farmyards or fields, or arrayed on the back porches of vast houses paid for by royalty advances. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young wear knock-off Army of the Potomac uniforms for Deja Vu; Paul and Linda McCartney share snapshots from life on McCartney's Scottish farm; even Dylan wanders alone through the Saugerties landscape on his official bootleg Self Portrait.

Few were immune to it: my parents, two Irish Catholic teenagers who had spent their whole brief lives in New Haven, suddenly decided to move, along with their two-year-old son, to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Jack Nicholson jumps on a tractor-trailer heading to Alaska at the end of Five Easy Pieces; Jimmy Page and Robert Plant hole up in Headley Grange, writing songs; The Band sing about scurrying back to their Catskill nests in "Time To Kill" (though the country life would kill Richard Manuel's songwriting, and even Levon Helm got hooked on smack in Woodstock). Neil Young used his 1,500-acre ranch in La Honda, California, as a wall between him and the world (this version of "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" was recorded as a rehearsal for a KQED-TV broadcast on 17 February 1970).

Bruce Cockburn's "Going to The Country" offers a variation on the dream, the modesty of its aspirations suggesting that for once the dream could be feasible; on Cockburn's first self-titled LP.

And Captain Beefheart's "Bellerin' Plain" is a pastoral too, of a sort; on Lick My Decals Off, Baby!


Rafelson, Five Easy Pieces.

Reincarnation: "Later I think I'll disappear into another womb/and take a look inside the men's room." Alice Cooper, before he/they was/were shtick (on Easy Action).

Work: "All I want to do is make some money/and bring you home some wine/for I don't want you ever to see me, standing in that line." Inspired in part by the humiliations endured by Ray and Dave Davies' father; on The Kinks' Lola vs. Powerman.

Marriage: "It's neighbors you annoy together/children you destroy together." Elaine Stritch steers "The Little Things You Do Together," from Sondheim's Company (original cast LP).


Eggleston, Sumner, Mississippi (Britt Daniel is a fan).

The pop charts were full of God and fear, of lullabies and chants borne by the amoral radio, absently hummed in taxis, crackled through faulty PA systems in beach towns, played on dust-flecked and scratched 45s that were brought to birthday parties or to show-and-tells (one such record bore a jam stain on its B-side, another was cracked into three equal shards after a child foolishly had stowed it in his knapsack). The songs opened like novels, closed like police reports. The preacher talked with me and he smiled (Tim Rose's cover of "I've Gotta Get a Message to You," is on Love, a Kind of Hate Story); dyin' young is hard to take, sellin' out is harder.

There was "Jennifer Tomkins," whose nameless singer worries about "trouble, trouble everywhere," whose title character is orphaned as a child, betrayed as a teenager. The song started life provisionally titled "Bubblegum Has Come to Town," but its creators (including Rupert Holmes) decided that the bubblegum vogue had ended, and so brought in poor Jennifer, sister to Mary Maguire (put on trial for prostitution) or Alice or the other lost girls of the late Sixties. (On 25 All Time Greatest Bubblegum Hits).

Or Freda Payne's "Band of Gold," a #3 hit in summer 1970 (#1 in the UK). Like Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe," from a few years before, its story is only half-told, the rest exists in gaps and silences. A child bride, an impotent (or gay) husband, a quick annulment: it seems to be a fragment of some Victorian domestic horror, a lost family scandal somehow unearthed in the tumult of the late '60s.

This is an earlier take where the elements have yet to gel, as the sitar hook isn't as pronounced and there's an odd bridge that doesn't work (and was scrapped). But Payne is grappling with a song that will make her immortal, and she finally drowns herself in it. (The alternate version shows up in various places like here.)


Yoshida, Rengoku Eroica.

Two of the Staples Singers made solo records in 1970. Mavis tried on some new attitudes ("Chained" is on Only For the Lonely) while Pops remembered a lost, shameful memory ("Black Boy," released as Stax 0064 c/w "Tryin' Time" in March 1970, is on Stax-Volt Singles Vol. 2.


Hepworth, The Family of Man (Yorkshire Sculpture Park).

Soundtracks: Johnnie Mandel's "Suicide Is Painless" is from Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, its lyric written by Altman's 14-year-old son. On M*A*S*H OST.

Antônio Jobim was hired by Paramount to compose a few songs for a Hollywood mortuary piece called The Adventurers, an adaptation of a Harold Robbins novel. One of Jobin's pieces was his love theme "Amparo," a gorgeous nocturne with Jobim on two keyboards and Hubert Laws on flute. The song will survive us, the film is scarcely remembered, the book is already forgotten. Recorded 16 March 1970 (with Ron Carter on bass); on Stone Flower.


Holding the line, Vietnam, 1970.

Variations: in the depths of Miles Davis' churning set on the last night of a stint at the Fillmore East, the concerts that established Davis as the jazzman for the rock age, Davis offered an eerie, brief rendition of Wayne Shorter's "Sanctuary."

Recorded 20 June 1970, with Steve Grossman (soprano sax), Chick Corea (electric piano), Keith Jarrett (organ), Dave Holland (b), Jack DeJohnette (d), and Airto Moreira (perc). On At Fillmore.

The British composer William Walton, in the summer of 1969, composed a variation on a theme that he had heard decades before from his countryman, friend and rival Benjamin Britten. He originally entitled it Elegiac Variations but decided the piece deserved a happier ending.

Here is the third movement, moderato. The piece was premiered by Josef Krips in San Francisco on 14 January 1970 and is performed here by the London Philharmonic (Raphael Wallfisch, cond.).


Richard Nixon and staff watch the splashdown of Apollo 13.

Vintage Violence is John Cale's bubblegum record: "Cleo" could be a 1910 Fruitgum Company song; "Big White Cloud" is bizarro Phil Spector. Cale wrote and recorded the songs at a pace, trying and failing to write songs that could be played on the radio.

Everything was slightly off--the lyrics seemed badly translated from another language ("my power amphibious bride," "someone took the tuba for a pony ride"), the production ranged from the pristine to the murky. Cale sang love songs from a man stuck in Australia, offered thoughts on death, recalled time spent in barrooms and hotels, told ghost stories. "Gideon's Bible" is as unknowable as the rest.



In Tove Jansson's Moomin novels, there's a character named Snufkin, a slight figure in a long coat who wears a wide-brimmed hat he's owned since birth: he arrives with the spring and departs for the south when the leaves start to turn. Donovan played this role in the 1960s, and as the times changed he wrapped up his few belongings, belted his coat and went off along the southern road, leaving the valley towns to contend with the winter and the floods. He left a note by the door, but no one cared to read it. (On Open Road.)

Top: Frame from Jack Chambers' The Hart of London, 1970. See film here.

Hello. In a bid to revive this site, I'm doing a couple of radical things. First, as the very look of the place was getting me down--it was shabby and ugly and dated--this new template (with which I will keep tinkering) is a first step towards bringing Locust St. into the 2010s. Sadly, as yet I've been unable to move all the old comments over, and worst-case scenario is that they'll be unmovable. So if that's true, my apologies to anyone who's commented over the years whose words have been erased by the capricious hand of Blogger.

Secondly, we're done with the 1920s for a long while. It got to be too much, and I likely would have just stopped doing the blog entirely--there were days I sat down to do "1925" and couldn't will myself to write a word. So I'll do what I've always done when inspiration has deserted me here: a time-jump. This will also be a means to get this place better tied in with my other research/writing/nonsense (Bowiesongs) of late.

The template change also erased the various internal links I had created, so use the following list as a sort-of long-delayed table of contents:

7 Drinks of Mankind:

Beer.
Wine.
Spirits.
Coffee.
Tea.
Cola.
Water.

6 Cardinal Colors:

Polychrome Overture.
Red.
Orange.
Yellow.
Green.
Blue.
Purple.
Monochrome Coda.

7 Means of Movement:

Walking.
Riding.
Sailing.
Railroading.
Driving.
Flying.
Rocketing.
Interludes: Bicycles, Asses and Mules, Submarines, Subways, Buses, Helicopters.

7 Deadly Sins:

Sloth.
Gluttony.
Lust.
Greed.
Envy.
Anger.
Pride.

Odds and Sods:

Debutantes.
Dry Bones: A History.
Stuttering Songs.
Hollywood: Rise.
Hollywood: Imperium
Hollywood: Decline and Fall.
Dreams.
The Press.
Immigrants.
Guns.
Bert Williams.
Songmasonry: After You've Gone.
Songmasonry: There'll Be Some Changes Made.
Songmasonry: Body and Soul (at BWF).

4 Seasons:

Spring.
Summer.
Autumn.
Winter.

The Locust Century (in Fragments):

1900-1901: Elite Syncopations.
1902-1903: The President Is Seven Years Old.
1904-1905: You Don't Own The State.
1906-1907: The Life Of Violets.
1908-1909: Nailed To the North Pole.
1910: The Suffragette That Knew Jiu-Jitsu.
1911: So Natural That You Want To Go To War.
1912: They All Talk Like Crows.
1913: We Went Canoeing and We've Been a-Wooing.
1914: Red War Yet Redder.
1915: Planes and Lines.
1916: The Troglodyte World.
1917: The Day of the Women's Death Battalion, Eddie Cantor's Ghost.
1918: Armistice.
1919: Broken Blossoms.
1920: Paradise Is Just a Curse.
1921: An Aria of Canaries, Normalcy.
1922: The Morning The Fiddlers Came, The Beneficent Spider.
1923: The Imperial Roman Jazz, The Second Line.
1924: New People.
1925: To come sometime.
1926: It's All Right Now.
1927: The Year Of the Perpetual Miracle.
1936: Rested For the Roll Call.
1937: Dust.
1945: From Henry Green to Charlie Parker.
1946: After The Rain.
1947: The Second Man.
1948-1949: From Red Foley to Robert Frost.
1950-1952: From Fats Domino to Kay Starr.
1953-1955: From Chet Atkins to Chuck Berry.
1956: Waiting in Place.
1957: Rave On As They Do In Real Life.
1958-1959: From G.L. Crockett to Robert Lowell.
1960-1961: From Joyce Harris to Bill Evans.
1966: Life Outside The Chrysalis Case.
1967: A Transient Thing.
1970: The Organization Ain't Really Organized.
1971: Sisters
1976: Romance Is On the Rise.
1977: Missed the Messiah.
1986: Not a Good Year.
1987: You Can Live At Home Now.
1996: Corruption Isn't Working Anymore.
1997: The Way We Were.

Howard Zinn, 1922-2010.



The Clash, Rebel Waltz.
Woody Guthrie, Better World A-Comin'.
Phil Ochs, I Ain't Marchin' Anymore.
Medicine Head, All For Tomorrow.

The prisoners of the system will continue to rebel, as before, in ways that cannot be foreseen, at times that cannot be predicted. The new fact of our era is the chance that they may be joined by the guards. We readers and writers of books have been, for the most part, among the guards. If we understand that, and act on it, not only will life be more satisfying, right off, but our grandchildren or our great-grandchildren, might possibly see a different and marvelous world.

The last lines of Zinn's People's History of the United States.

Absent Friends



Jim Carroll, People Who Died.
John Martyn, Over The Hill.
Jim Dickinson and the New Beale Street Sheiks, You'll Do It All the Time.
Eddie Bo, Check Your Bucket.
The Seeds, Pushin' Too Hard.
Buck Griffin, Bawlin' and Squallin'.
The Ronettes, Baby, I Love You.
Billy Lee Riley, Red Hot.
The Cramps, Human Fly.
Hank Locklin, Please Help Me I'm Falling.
Blossom Dearie, Tea For Two.
Les Paul and Mary Ford, In The Good Old Summertime.
The Stooges, Not Right.
Pylon, Crazy.
Jack Rose, White Mule.
The Alan Parsons Project, Time.
Wilco, When You Wake Up Feeling Old.
Vic Chesnutt, New Town.
Maryanne Amacher, The Music Rooms.
The Revolutionary Ensemble, New York.
George Russell, Concerto For Billy The Kid.
Peter and Gordon, Nobody I Know.
Willy DeVille, Just To Walk That Little Girl Home.
Paul Revere and the Raiders, Him or Me (What's It Gonna Be).
Carl Perkins, Glad All Over.
The Delfonics, (Didn't I) Blow Your Mind This Time.
The Three Degrees, Collage.
Louisa Mark, Keep It Like It Is.
Michael Jackson, Ain't No Sunshine.



Jim Carroll, 1949-2009. On Catholic Boy.

John Martyn, 1948-2009. On Solid Air.

Jim Dickinson, 1941-2009. World boogie came for him at last. "You'll Do It All the Time," from 1964, is on It Came From Memphis Vol. 2.

Eddie Bo, 1930-2009. What if James Brown had come from New Orleans? "Check Your Bucket," from 1970, is on New Orleans Funk.

Sky Saxon, 1937-2009. "Pushin' Too Hard" is on The Seeds.

Buck Griffin, 1923-2009. A weathervane who turned in any direction he could: country, rockabilly, blues. "Ballin' and Squallin'," from 1955, is on Let's Elope Baby.

Estelle Bennett, the forgotten Ronette (1941-2009), and a bard of postwar teenage America, Ellie Greenwich (1940-2009). Greenwich co-wrote "Baby I Love You" and Bennett helped bring it to life; on Wall of Sound.

Billy Lee Riley, 1933-2009. "Red Hot," from 1957, is the title of the best Riley compilation.

Lux Interior, 1946-2009. He is survived by the Rev. Tom Frost. The Cramps' "Human Fly" is on Off The Bone.

Blossom Dearie, 1924-2009. Quintessence of charm. Her "Tea for Two," from 1958, is on Once Upon a Summertime.

Hank Locklin, 1918-2009. On RCA Country Legends.



Guitar men: Les Paul, 1915-2009 (on Best of the Capitol Masters), Ron Asheton (1948-2009), on The Stooges; Pylon's Randy Bewley, 1955-2009 (their 1981 single "Crazy" is collected on Chomp) and Jack Rose, 1971-2009, on Red Horse, White Mule.

Eric Woolfson, 1945-2009, singer/lyricist for The Alan Parsons Project. "Time" is on Best Of.

Jay Bennett, 1963-2009. On Wilco's 1999 Summerteeth.

Vic Chesnutt, 1964-2009. "New Town" is on 1996's (out of print) About To Choke.

Maryanne Amacher, 1938-2009.

Sirone (Norris Jones), 1940-2009. Bassist and co-founder of The Revolutionary Ensemble, later a member of James Blood Ulmer's Phalanx. On the magnificent 1975 LP The People's Republic, which has never been released on CD.

George Russell, 1923-2009. His "Concerto For Billy The Kid," from 1956, is one of the first spotlights for Bill Evans. On Complete Bluebird Recordings.

Gordon Waller, 1945-2009. Peter and Gordon's 1964 "Nobody I Know" (a Lennon/McCartney discard) is on Ultimate Peter and Gordon.

Drake Levin, 1946-2009. Guitarist for Paul Revere and the Raiders. On Greatest Hits.

Willy DeVille, 1950-2009. On his best record, 1980's Le Chat Bleu.

Aaron Schroeder, 1926-2009. Songwriter ("It's Now or Never," "I Got Stung," the Scooby-Doo theme), producer (Gene Pitney), talent spotter (Jimi Hendrix), magus (The Banana Splits). In 1957 he co-wrote "Glad All Over" for Carl Perkins (with Sid Tepper and Roy Bennett): it should've been a hit. On Sun Singles.

Randy Cain, 1945-2009. Singer and co-founder of The Delfonics. "Didn't I Blow Your Mind" is on La-La Means I Love You.

Louisa Mark, 1960-2009. The belle of lovers' rock. "Keep It Like It Is," from 1977, is on Breakout.

Fayette Pinkney, 1948-2009. Original member of The Three Degrees, Prince Charles' favorite band. "Collage" is on 1970's Maybe.

Michael Jackson, 1958-2009. A line that Chrissie Hynde wrote at the peak of Jackson's fame serves as his epitaph: "the wretched life of a lonely heart." On 1971's Got To Be There, collected on Music & Me.



Ave atque vale: Alicia de Laroccha, J.G. Ballard, Patrick McGoohan, John Updike, Barry Letts, Robin Wood, Elisabeth Söderström, John Hughes, Millvina Dean (the last survivor of the Titanic), Taylor Mitchell, Allen Klein, Wayman Tisdale (baller, bassist), Dame Paddy Ridsdale (the original Miss Moneypenny), Mary Travers, Philip Jose Farmer, Andrew Wyeth, Lucy Vodden, Irving Penn, Mr. Percival, Brittany Murphy (the latest incarnation of Mary C. Brown), Jody Powell, Captain Lou Albano, Sen. Ted Kennedy, Mark "Bird" Fidrych, Dick Katz and Larry Knechtel, master session man (The Doors, The Beach Boys), whose piano on "Bridge Over Troubled Water" was the compass for Garfunkel's flight.

My life as a mistaken Jew is the final installment of Boogie Woogie Flu's Hanukkah series. With a preface by John Berryman (thanks, JB!)

Merry Christmas and happy (belated) Hanukkah!

New People, 1924



Eddie Hunter and Alex Rogers with Luckey Roberts, I'm Done.
Clarence M. Jones, Hula Lou.
Jimmy Blythe, Chicago Stomp.
Old Southern Jug Band, Hatchet-Head Blues.
The Mound City Blue Blowers, Red Hot!
Blossom Seeley with the Georgians, Lazy.
Viola McCoy with Fletcher Henderson's Jazz Five, I Ain't Gonna Marry, Ain't Gonna Settle Down.
Rosa Henderson & the Choo Choo Jazzers, Hard Hearted Hannah.
Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Lucky Rock Blues.
Elkins-Payne Jubilee Singers, Ezekiel Saw De Wheel.
Vernon Dalhart, The Prisoner's Song.
The Wolverines (with Bix Beiderbecke), Riverboat Shuffle.
Jo Trent (with Duke Ellington), Deacon Jazz.
Francis Poulenc, Les Biches: Rag-Mazurka.
Jacques Ibert, Escales: Tunis-Nefta (modéré très rythmé).
Vincent Rose and His Orchestra, Helen Gone.
Wendell Hall, Comfortin' Gal.
Clarence Williams' Blue Five (with Louis Armstrong), Everybody Loves My Baby.

We're pioneers--new people--you can trust us.

Banner at a Soviet Young Pioneer camp, USSR, shown in Vertov's Kino-Eye, 1924.


VanDer Zee, "Marcus Garvey in a Regalia."

Two jokers and a piano player:

Eddie Hunter and Alex Rogers were singers, hustlers, stage pros: Rogers was an old collaborator of Bert Williams (he had written the lyrics of "Nobody" and other Williams standards) while the younger Hunter first drew notice for starring in and writing the libretto of How Come? (which got poor reviews, with critics claiming it baldly ripped off Sissle and Blake's Shuffle Along revue). Still, it was enough notoriety for Victor Records to offer Hunter (whose press agents were calling him "the colored Jimmy Barton") a contract, and late in 1923 he brought in Rogers and the pianist Luckey Roberts to cut four sides.

One of them was "I'm Done," a track some writers have called dated and corny (to the point where it's even been wrongly listed as a 1919 record in some references). Balls to that: "I'm Done" is prime American comic patter with modernity in the precision of its timing, in the way the actors bounce off each other, echo and undercut each other's words and slide into a common groove, with Roberts' stride piano dancing in the background. (Roberts, who held onto his copyrights, ran a popular bar and invested in NYC real estate, died a rich man.)

Recorded ca. November 1923 and released as Victor 19247 c/w "Bootleggers Ball." On George Williams and Bessie Brown No. 2.


"Great is Grief, Greater Still is the Heritage": USSR poster commemorating the death of Lenin.

Two lost pianists:

Clarence M. Jones was a Chicago pianist (he accompanied Monette Moore and Laura Smith, among other blues singers), songwriter ("The Dirty Dozen," "Daddy Blues," "Trot Along," "Thanks for the Lobster") and bandleader (he headed the Wonder Orchestra at the Owl Theater, which sounds like something out of a Michael Chabon novel). Thomas Hennessey, in his From Jazz to Swing, claims that Jones and trumpeter Jimmy Wade opened the Chicago Loop district to black musicians. Jones (1889-1949) survives today only in the margins of histories--he remains an unknown influence, a ghost.

Jones' "Hula Lou," a solo piano variation of a then-popular stage novelty, doesn't appear to be as much an improvisation as it is a set piece, but it has a steady bounce to it and shows off Jones' fleet, dashing style. Recorded ca. April 1924 and released as Autograph 492 (later 499) c/w "Maybe (She'll Write Me, She'll Phone Me)"; on Archive of American Popular Music.


The Levys, a Jewish family on the island of Rhodes, 1924 (Rhodes Jewish Museum). Jews had lived on Rhodes since the 2nd Century BC. During World War II, all 2,000 Jews on the island were arrested and deported by the Nazis: most were sent to Auschwitz, and all but 150 were killed. Today about 40 Jews live on Rhodes.

Jimmy Blythe was born in Keene, Kentucky, in 1901 and died of epidemic meningitis thirty years later. He had moved to Chicago as a young man and spent the '20s as an accompanist on blues records (including Blind Blake and "Ma" Rainey), making some jazz tracks with Johnny Dodds and doing the occasional solo turn, though like Clarence Jones he primarily made a living by cutting hundreds of piano rolls for nickelodeons.

Blythe's "Chicago Stomp" shows just how strong a player he was, and makes one regret that the man only cut eight solo sides in his short life--"Stomp" is one of the first (if not the first) recorded examples of pure boogie-woogie piano, dominated by Blythe's rolling left-hand bassline.

Recorded in April 1924 and released as Paramount 12207 c/w "Armour Ave. Struggle"; on Boogie Woogie Blues.


"Miss Mary Bay likes her car because it is easy to park." Washington DC, January 1924 (Shorpy).

Two ramshackle collections:

The Old Southern Jug Band was an alias of Clifford Hayes' Dixieland Jug Blowers, working on another label. Allen Lowe calls the Jug Band's "Hatchet-Head Blues" one of the few surviving recordings of a brass- and string-band hybrid, with a banjo, jug bass and cornet all vying for attention.

"Hatchet-Head Blues" was recorded 24 November 1924 and released as Vocalion 14958 c/w "Blues, Just Blues, That's All"; on Clifford Hayes and the Louisville Jug Bands Vol. 1.


Weston, "Galván Shooting (Manuel Hernández Galván, Mexico)."

The Mound City Blue Blowers were founded by early jazz hipster and former St. Louis bellboy Red McKenzie (he played comb and sang) and included some developing talent, including Frank Trumbauer. Their first 1924 sides, especially "Red Hot!" are pretty fantastic stuff--who knew the kazoo could swing like this?

Recorded 14 March 1924 and released as Brunswick 2602 c/w "San"; on Hot Comb and Tin Can.


Slats the Lion being filmed for his latest MGM logo spot

Four blues stingers (even the icemen leave them alone):

Blossom Seeley was a vamp of early vaudeville--here's one description of a 1911 performance: "[Seeley] danced on the table to show off her shapely legs, and she used the platform to launch a dance craze. As an encore she performed the Texas Tommy, a dance originated by black vaudevillians in San Francisco's Barbary Coast. Theater critics were generally nonplussed by the way she toddled and shook, but Broadway audiences loved it" (Armond Fields and L. Marc Fields). She married a baseball player and later another vaudevillian, and lived long enough to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Her hot version of Irving Berlin's "Lazy" was cut with The Georgians on 27 March 1924 and released as Columbia 114-D c/w "Don't Mind the Rain"; on Georgians 1923-1924.


Progress: six-pack of Coke in milk-carton-shaped paper bag.

Viola McCoy, born in either Mississippi or Memphis ca. 1900, went through names as if they were pairs of shoes--she was born Amanda Brown, and recorded under Daisy Cliff, Bessie Williams, Fannie Johnson and Susan Williams, among others, suggesting that she probably still has some lost records out there. She had a refined contralto that could still deliver the blues. "I Ain't Gonna Marry, Ain't Gonna Settle Down" is a cold-eyed look at monogamy, which McCoy suggests is a lost cause. "It's nice to say that you are man and wife/but it's hard to find a pal who'll stick through life," she says, her eyes on the door.

"I Ain't Gonna Marry" was cut on 11 March 1924 with Fletcher Henderson (who had written the song with Ethel Waters) and released as Brunswick 2591 c/w the wonderfully-titled "If Your Good Man Quits You, Don't Wear No Black." On Viola McCoy Vol. 2.


Steichen, Gloria Swanson.

The outrageous Rosa Henderson cut a song in 1924 entitled (seriously) "Strut Yo' Puddy." From the same session is her version of "Hard Hearted Hannah," in which Henderson sounds like she could give Hannah a run for her money. It was recorded ca. September 1924 with the Choo Choo Jazzers and released as Ajax 17060; on Rosa Henderson Vol. 3.

Gertrude "Ma" Rainey starts the first verse of "Lucky Rock Blues" slowly, as if rousing her self from slumber. "Feelin'...kind of...melancholy," she moans, "made up my mind to go away," her voice more resonant than a saxophone, sinking lower than a trombone. The only one who can keep up with her is Tommy Ladnier, whose sharp 12-bar trumpet solo offers a taste of the New Orleans salvation Rainey is heading off to find.

Recorded March 1924 and released as Paramount 12215 c/w "Those Dogs of Mine"; on Ma Rainey Vol. 1.



Two commercial spiritualists (or professional hillbillies):

The Elkins-Payne Jubilee Singers were among the many black gospel groups who cut records in the '20s, as labels tried to find a commercial successor to the Fisk Jubilee Singers, which had established the "jubilee" style of gospel singing. Elkins-Payne were as much show-biz as they were spiritual: their leader, William C. Elkins, wasn't a minister but a former director of Bert Williams' vaudeville show. In their version of "Ezekiel Saw De Wheel," the lead female singer Eloise Uggams offers struggle and vitality, while the lead male singer (likely Elkins) is tradition and stasis.

Recorded 24 November 1924 and released as Okeh 40250 c/w "You Must Shun Old Satan" (good advice); on Complete Recordings.


DuBois, Mr. and Mrs. Chester Dine Out.

The sure 'nough Southerner talks almost like a Negro, even when he's white. I've broken myself of the habit, more or less, in ordinary conversation but it still comes pretty easily.

Vernon Dalhart.

Vernon Dalhart, born Marion Slaughter in Jefferson, Texas, in 1883, worked as a cattle puncher, studied at the Dallas Conservatory of Music and came to New York City in 1910, where he sang blackface minstrel songs and Puccini. His first recording for Edison was in 1917 and Dalhart soon gained a reputation for being a good dialect man (see above quote), recording everything from Hawaiian novelties to blackface numbers.

In 1924 Dalhart cut "The Prisoner's Song" and "Wreck of the Old 97," which became country music's first million-selling record. However it's barely what we today would consider "country," as Dalhart sings "Prisoner's Song" in a stately, slightly ridiculous tenor with only a trace of an accent. (Ralph Peer, who produced the record, later called him "a professional substitute for a real hillbilly.") Non-Southern audiences needed their first exposure to white rural music (which "Prisoner's Song" was for many) to not be too exotic, and the rich melody underpinned by basic guitar-and-fiddle accompaniment made the dose go down easy. The record's success inspired labels like Victor to head down South in search of new prospects, while Dalhart eventually wound up working as a hotel clerk in his old age.

Recorded 13 July 1924 and released as Victor 19427 c/w "Wreck of the Old 97"; on Country Gold Vol. 2 and 8,000 other compilations.


Davis, Odol.

Two precocious carpet crawlers:

Leon Bismark "Bix" Beiderbecke joined the Hamilton, Ohio-based jazz band The Wolverines (named after the Jelly Roll Morton song they played incessantly) towards the end of 1923, and his first-ever recordings came with the band a few months later when they had relocated to Cincinnati. Beiderbecke, all of 21 years old, was already developing new ways to play the cornet, such as emphasizing the horn's middle range and using subtler phrasing.

In April 1924, a young composer named Hoagy Carmichael invited the band to come to Bloomington, Indiana, as he had written a composition inspired by them and written specifically to showcase his friend Bix: "Riverboat Shuffle." The Wolverines' recording of the song is Beiderbecke's first great record, with a carefully crafted solo in which Bix circles through various melodic motifs and makes a glittering string of blue notes.

Recorded 6 May 1924 and released as Gennett 5454 c/w "Susie (of the Islands)"; on Bix and the Wolverines.



"Deacon Jazz," credited to Jo Trent and the Deacons, is one of the first recordings of a 25-year-old pianist and fledgling bandleader named Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington. Ellington had come to New York from Washington DC in 1922 and had spent years scrabbling around for work. By 1924, he had taken over Elmer Snowden's six-man band the Washingtonians and started getting regular gigs, including long engagements at the Kentucky Club.

Ellington and the Washingtonians cut their debut records in November 1924 for the tiny label Blu-Disc, including backing the singer/songwriter Jo Trent on Ellington's own "Deacon Jazz." The track doesn't have the full band, only Ellington, Otto Hardwick on C-melody sax, George Francis on banjo and drummer Sonny Greer, but Ellington's brief piano solo is a cloudburst of a thing, suggesting in miniature the riches to come.

Recorded November 1924 and released as Blu Disc T-1003 c/w "Oh How I Love My Darling"; on Black and White Piano.


Rietveld Schröder House, Utrecht.

Two Frenchmen, one wayward, one stolid:

Francis Poulenc "invents his own folklore," Maurice Ravel once said, while Claude Rostand famously called him "half monk, half delinquent." Poulenc was a member of Les Six and a composer who wrote everything from art songs to ballets to oratorios (but unlike his Six colleague Darius Milhaud, he said he disliked jazz). His Les Biches, a ballet inspired by Watteau paintings of Louis XIV and his various women (sometimes in Louis XIV's deer park, hence Poulenc's title), is set in a modern-day hipster party attended by "twenty charming and flirtatious women" and "three strapping young fellows dressed as oarsmen." Poulenc's score consists in part of snarky rehabilitations of older musical types, such as the mazurka section featured here (meant to accompany a scene in which the oarsmen flirt with and then chase down the party's hostess, who has "yards of pearls and a meaningfully-long cigarette holder").

Premiered on 6 January 1924 by the Ballets Russes at the Theatre de Monte Carlo; this recording is conducted by Yan Pascal Tortelier and performed by the Ulster Orchestra.

Jacques Ibert, perhaps irritated by being left out of "Les Six," later formed a smaller club of composers with Six members Milhaud and Arthur Honegger. Ibert's Escales (Ports of Call), premiered on the same day as Les Biches, offers overseas exotica in place of Poulenc's dinner-party hijinks. "Tunis-Nefta," the second part of the piece, features an oboe imitating Arab music over a driving beat delivered by tympani and strings.

Premiered on 6 January 1924 in Paris; this recording is conducted by Eiji Oue and performed by the Minnesota Orchestra.


Oil drillers, Iran, 1924.

Three last songs, mainly about women:

Vincent Rose, born in Palermo, Italy, in 1880, headed a jazz dance band called the Montmartre Cafe Orchestra (it wasn't inspired by anything in Paris, but was the name of a Hollywood hangout for actors). While he was best known for hits like "Whispering," Rose's "Helen Gone" is a sparkplug of a track--fast, silly, irresistible. Recorded in Oakland on 12 June 1924 and released as Victor 19398; on Archive of American Popular Music.

Wendell Hall's "Comfortin' Gal" isn't the hayseed epic that his "Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo'" was but it still pops, with Hall's ukulele providing rickety support for his gloriously hokey vocal, which ranges from spoken asides to a dash of lunatic humming. Recorded 15 January 1924 and released as Victor 19207 c/w "It Looks Like Rain" (one of Hall's shameless sequels to "It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo'").

And Clarence Williams' "Everybody Loves My Baby" has Louis Armstrong offering just one of the dozen of brilliant solos he reeled off that year (6 November 1924; OKeh 8181; on Portrait of the Artist).