Music Legacy

Newman takes reins at Blues Foundation           

By LANCE WIEDOWER

Barbara B. Newman is The Blues Foundation’s new president and CEO.
She takes the reins of the organization which opened its new public face
 – the Blues Hall of Fame – in May.
(Daily News/Andrew J. Breig)

         
When Barbara Newman took over as president and CEO of The Blues Foundation, it was her first job in the music industry.

But to be clear, Newman’s path has been pointing to the position since she was a child meeting musical icons such as Duke Ellington and Leonard Bernstein.

Her grandfather’s twin brother was a session player in Muscle Shoals, Ala., and at Stax, where he was a violinist on Isaac Hayes’ classic “Shaft.” He also was a charter member of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra.

And a young Newman was a witness to it all.
“From the time I was really young, that music piece was important to me,” said Newman, who replaced the retiring Jay Sieleman Oct. 1. “I was raised with it. But it wasn’t a path I planned for myself.”

Today, Newman leads The Blues Foundation to further its mission to preserve blues history, celebrate recording and performance excellence, support education and expand appreciation, awareness and enjoyment of the art.

The public facing piece of that mission is the Blues Hall of Fame, which opened in May in the storefront of the foundation’s South Main Historic Arts District office. The hall has existed since the 1980s, but only this year has a physical home where it helps support the foundation’s educational mission.

“By having a footprint where people can engage with the blues, it will give the opportunity for that music to be preserved and for people to experience it in a live setting,” Newman said. “I see the Blues Hall of Fame as a key point of preserving history.”

More than 350 performers, industry professionals, recordings and literature have been inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. Having the physical presence, at 421 S. Main St. across the street from the National Civil Rights Museum, gives the foundation an important opportunity to honor these contributors while educating visitors on music’s impact.

“Being directly across from the Civil Rights Museum, visitors can learn about the struggle then walk across the street to hear the music of the struggle,” Newman said. “But just because it’s called the blues doesn’t mean it’s sad and oppressive. People who haven’t taken the time to listen because they think it’s sad music, when they hear it they want to engage in the music. That’s part of the education process.”

Newman grew up in Memphis. After graduating from Brown University she went to work in New York City at National Westminster Bank USA. She went through the loan officer development program and moved along a path that gave her experience in corporate finance.

She left work when her children were born, and in 1989 she and her husband, Bruce Newman, decided to move the family to Memphis. Read more at source

B.B. King dies at 89

B. B. King, Defining Bluesman for Generations, Dies at 89
By TIM WEINER MAY 15, 2015

B. B. King, whose world-weary voice and wailing guitar lifted him from the cotton fields of Mississippi to a global stage and the apex of American blues, died on Thursday at his home in Las Vegas. He was 89.

 

John Fudenberg, the coroner of Clark County, Nev., said the cause was a series of small strokes attributable to Type 2 diabetes, The Associated Press reported. Mr. King, who was in hospice care, had been in poor health but had continued to perform until October, when he canceled a tour, citing dehydration and exhaustion stemming from the diabetes.

 

Mr. King married country blues to big-city rhythms and created a sound instantly recognizable to millions: a stinging guitar with a shimmering vibrato, notes that coiled and leapt like an animal, and a voice that groaned and bent with the weight of lust, longing and lost love.

 

“I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions,” Mr. King said in his autobiography, “Blues All Around Me” (1996), written with David Ritz.

 

In performances, his singing and his solos flowed into each other as he wrung notes from the neck of his guitar, vibrating his hand as if it were wounded, his face a mask of suffering. Many of the songs he sang — like his biggest hit, “The Thrill Is Gone” (“I’ll still live on/But so lonely I’ll be”) — were poems of pain and perseverance.

 

The music historian Peter Guralnick once noted that Mr. King helped expand the audience for the blues through “the urbanity of his playing, the absorption of a multiplicity of influences, not simply from the blues, along with a graciousness of manner and willingness to adapt to new audiences and give them something they were able to respond to.”

 

B. B. stood for Blues Boy, a name he took with his first taste of fame in the 1940s. His peers were bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, whose nicknames fit their hard-bitten lives. But he was born a King, albeit in a shack surrounded by dirt-poor sharecroppers and wealthy landowners.

Mr. King went out on the road and never came back after one of his first recordings reached the top of the rhythm-and-blues charts in 1951. He began in juke joints, country dance halls and ghetto nightclubs, playing 342 one-night stands in 1956 and 200 to 300 shows a year for a half-century thereafter, rising to concert halls, casino main stages and international acclaim.

 

He was embraced by rock ’n’ roll fans of the 1960s and ’70s, who remained loyal as they grew older together. His playing influenced many of the most successful rock guitarists of the era, including Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

 

Mr. King considered a 1968 performance at the Fillmore West, the San Francisco rock palace, to have been the moment of his commercial breakthrough, he told a public-television interviewer in 2003. A few years earlier, he recalled, an M.C. in an elegant Chicago club had introduced him thus: “O.K., folks, time to pull out your chitlin’s and your collard greens, your pigs’ feet and your watermelons, because here is B. B. King.” It had infuriated him.

 

When he saw “longhaired white people” lining up outside the Fillmore, he said, he told his road manager, “I think they booked us in the wrong place.” Then the promoter Bill Graham introduced him to the sold-out crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the chairman of the board, B. B. King.”

 

“Everybody stood up, and I cried,” Mr. King said. “That was the beginning of it.”

 

By his 80th birthday he was a millionaire many times over. He owned a mansion in Las Vegas, a closet full of embroidered tuxedos and smoking jackets, a chain of nightclubs bearing his name (including a popular room on West 42nd Street in Manhattan) and the personal and professional satisfaction of having endured.  Read more at source

 

 

GEORGE "Possum" JONES

George Jones, the definitive country singer of the last half-century, died Friday at a hospital in Nashville. He was 81.  New York Times obituary.

Below is from the best, most poignant and heartfelt of obituaries I have found, USA Today:

NASHVILLE - George Jones, whose supple Texas voice conveyed heartbreak so profound that he became perhaps the most imitated singer in country music, died Friday at Vanderbilt University Medical Center after being hospitalized April 18 with irregular blood pressure. He was 81.

Hank Williams may have set country music's mythology and Johnny Cash its attitude, but Jones gave the genre its ultimate voice. With recordings that spanned 50 years, including No. 1 singles White Lightning, She Thinks I Still Care and He Stopped Loving Her Today, Jones influenced generations of country singers and was considered by many to be the greatest of them all.

Ultimately, though, it was that voice that won Jones two Grammys, got him into the Country Music Hall of Fame and made him an American musical icon. That plaintive voice that seemed to break down at will and wallow in sorrow. That voice of honky-tonk eloquence that held tortured echoes of heroes like Williams, Roy Acuff and Lefty Frizzell. That finely nuanced voice that offered thrill rides of emotions, with twists and turns, slippery, bending notes and sudden drops.

Jones' performances weren't just an emotional rollercoaster, they were the whole theme park.
...
Jones' greatest artistic achievement came with Sherrill, his regular producer for much of the 1970s and '80s. Sherrill, an admirer of Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" musical architecture, constructed his own masterpieces using Jones' voice as scaffolding. Instead of competing with the singer's dramatic delivery, Sherrill complemented it with vocal choruses, theatrical string sections and tensile pedal steel guitar lines. Sherrill's lavish productions didn't bury Jones, they revealed previously unheard subtleties of expression.

The pair reached their peak with the 1980 release of He Stopped Loving Her Today, widely considered to be the greatest country record ever made and one that, according to many involved with its creation, took more than a year to get on tape because Jones was so wrecked by cocaine and bourbon.

http://youtu.be/T4IP3tLsecQ


"He said I'll love you 'til I die/She told him you'll forget in time," Jones sang as he began the Bobby Braddock/Curly Putman tune, needing only three minutes and 15 seconds to convey a lifetime of emotional devastation, the kind that takes hold of a man and doesn't let go, not ever.

 "Now, that voice has gone silent. They may lay a wreath upon his door. Soon, they'll carry him away. But we will not stop loving him today."  Read more at source

And yet at this time he recorded perhaps his greatest song, 1980's "He Stopped Loving Her Today," the tale of a man who continued pining for his lost love many years after she left him. The song, written by Bobby Braddock and Curly Putnam, has been voted the greatest country song of all time in a Country Music Magazine poll.

"He had a voice that was the truth, raw and unfiltered," Kenny Chesney, who opened the 1995 George Jones/Tammy Wynette reunion tour, said in a statement. "You can't get any realer, any more tortured or any more alive. No one can do what George Jones does, and that's why 50 years later, he still stands out as one of the greatest singers in any genre of all time."

Personal comments: I truly was fortunate to grow up in the heart of the blues/rock/country era in Memphis, TN and the Mississippi Delta, and then spent the better part of the Sixties and Seventies in Texas.   I saw George in person at Fort Worth's Panther Hall in the early 1960s, as he was emerging to be the epitome country singer. This was an "all-day, beer-drinking" marathon of country music, and I fell in love so much with the genre that I went back the following day for another dose! It was magical! Hank Thompson and the Brazos Valley Boys, Ernest Tubb, Leroy Van Dyke ("Walk On By"), Willie Nelson (clean shaven!), Country Charlie Pride, Gentleman Jim Reeves, Carl Perkins, Webb Pierce. Even though Rock 'n' Roll was always blaring on the jukeboxes, there were always signature songs by George Jones, like "The Race Is On" mixed in.    At that time, Ray Charles' "Country" album had just come out, and everyone was "country" it seemed! 

http://youtu.be/9-hBAwaH6CI

 SMITHSONIAN CHANNEL: SOUND REVOLUTION

Smithsonian Channel: Sound Revolution - You may be able to find full episodes of this series on your local cable channel's "On Demand".  Check it out.  The series is no longer available for free, but a DVD may be available.  Check Amazon.com or the Smithsonian web site.

Smithsonian Channel's Sound Revolution is a documentary television series hosted by award-winning actor Morgan Freeman. Documentary footage, expert interviews and musical performances trace the origins of be-bop, jazz, rock 'n' roll and soul music, all emanating from “ground zero” – Clarksdale, Mississippi – and the Mississippi Delta. Each hour-long program is filled with recent performances, largely from the Montreux Jazz Festival, featuring performances by: B.B. King, Ike Tuner, Buddy Guy, Etta James, Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana, Robert Cray, Miles Davis, The Neville Brothers and many others. The show premiered November 2008 on Smithsonian Networks.

Part of this story is told in the series, Electrified: The History of the Electric Guitar  from PBS.  This was separate and apart from the Sound Revolution series, but it contains a great deal of the history of modern music as it evolved with the Electric Guitar.  Part 1   Part 2   Part 3   Part 4  Part 5  Part 6  PBS also has explored our American musical roots in a series of its own:  Electrified: The Guitar Revolution

In the series, Aerial America, the Smithsonian's Mississippi segment discusses the deep musical heritage of the Mississippi Delta region.  Aerial America - Mississippi

 





Elisa Redmond of Dublin, Ireland, visited the Cotton Museum of Memphis
earlier this year, where a series of life-sized mannequins recreate the old
trading floor of the Memphis Cotton Exchange.     (Photo: Lance Murphey)

 Telling Cotton’s Story

 Cotton Museum embarks on major membership drive

Friday, August 19, 2011

By Aisling Maki



The Cotton Museum at the Memphis Cotton Exchange has attracted more than 40,000 visitors from around the world since opening its doors in 2006, but new executive director Anna Mullins is on a mission to engage more Memphians in the story of the crop that helped shape their community.

Elisa Redmond of Dublin, Ireland, visited the Cotton Museum of Memphis earlier this year, where a series of life-sized mannequins recreate the old trading floor of the Memphis Cotton Exchange.