Sunday, January 22, 2012

Woody Guthrie's New Years Resolutions and more

Greetings, all.  Thought I'd wish everyone a Happy New Year with a couple of music-related tidbits that have come my way, a recommendation, and some songs.

First this, from Woody Guthrie's notebook in 1942: His list of New Year's resolutions, some of which I'm sure we could all resolve to do as well -- and some, maybe not... (click on it to enlarge)



OK, tidbit #2, a link sent to me by a friend, of an audio clip of Randy Bachman relating discovering the true structure of the opening chord of the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night":
http://web.me.com/mlutthans/Site_68/Welcome.html
Quite entertaining in a music-nerd sort of way.

In the recommendations department, I just thought I'd put here what I thought was the best new album that I got this year, one which actually is appearing on some other Best-of-2011 lists that I've seen as well: Gillian Welch's "The Harrow and The Harvest".  Very melancholy, no more than two acoustic instruments and two voices on any track, all new songs that sound as if they might have been recorded by the Carter Family or even Woody Guthrie, sort of like Norman Blake's albums from the 70's.  I can't not listen to it.

And finally, some new personal recordings:  I got together with some friends a few weeks ago, musicians with whom, mostly, I've played before but never all together: Howard Markman, Glenn Workman, Steve Raskin and Mark Young.  And I think I can also correctly say that they hadn't all played together before either.  We gathered at Steve's house, put a little recorder in the middle of us, and played songs which at least one of us knew, and the others figured it out as we went along.  Just one shot at each song, then move along to the next one, some of them sort of standard-ish in the acoustic music world, some originals. It was a lot of fun.  All of them can be heard in the last post of 2011, but here's links to a couple: My song Mabelline, and Howard singing Looking At The World Through A Windshield..

Alrighty, then, Happy New Year...  'til next time...
Sam

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