Some country blues and other mp3's from Douglas Day, recorded between
1980-1995.
See short descriptions, musical bio, below.
Blues:
Policy Man Blues (Bo Carter, arr. D. Day)
Take Out Some Insurance (Jimmy Reed, arr. D. Day
Kind-Hearted Woman Blues (Robert Johnson, arr. D. Day.
Pearly Gates/Dark is the Night . (Blind Willie McTell, arr. D. Day/Blind Willie Johnson, arr. Ry Cooder)
Payday. (Mississippi John Hurt, arr. D. Day)
I'm Troubled (Muddy Waters, arr. D. Day)
Long Gone (Lightnin' Hopkins, arr D. Day)
Screaming and Crying (Blind Boy Fuller, arr. D. Day) |
Other:
Born to be Blue (Mel Torme, arr. D. Day)
Funny (But I Still Love You) (Ray Charles, arr. D. Day)
I Had to Cry (J. Mathis, arr. Johnny Winters, D. Day)
Don't Take it Too Bad (Townes Van Zandt, arr. D. Day)
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Notes:
I recorded these old songs several years ago, between 1981 and 1990, and am just putting them up here as an experiment. These are really just rough home recordings, nothing professional. If this mp3 experiment works, I'll try putting up some field recordings, maybe put up a few more of my own. Please let me know what you think at
dday@cfw.com
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Policy Man Blues. A 12-bar country blues by Bo Carter of the the Mississippi Sheiks, ca. 1933. I overdubbed a couple of guitar parts, on top of Carter's original guitar arrangement in a dropped-D tuning. On a 1972 metal-bodied Dobro and my dad's old 1955 Gibson LGO (both of which I still have). I recorded this one weekend in 1991 in Martin's Creek, North Carolina, on a borrowed Tascam four-track cassette. I transferred the original to a DAT machine around 1995.
Take Out Some Insurance on Me Baby. Same weekend as above, 1991. A Jimmy Reed standard in E.
Kind-Hearted Woman Blues. Op cit., 1991. This is more electrical, an arrangement of the Robert Johnson original, probably influenced by the time I heard Alan Lomax's field recording of Muddy Waters doing the same song. I played some harmonica.
Pearly Gates/Dark is the Night . A gospel song by Blind Willie McTell, from the old Atlantic album, followed by the Blind Wille Johnson instrumental found on the old Riverside album). This was recorded live at the Cherry Tree Coffeehouse in Philadelphia in 1987. On a metal-bodied Dobro with bottleneck.
Payday. This is a version of Mississippi John Hurt's song. I've played it with a bottleneck since high school, though Hurt played it bare-fingered. This was recorded at Jon Fink's farm in 1980. Played on an old "found" Silvertone Danelectro electric. The guitar died a sad, splintery death shortly thereafter.
I'm Troubled (Can't Be Satisfied). The Muddy Waters standard. I play it here the way I heard it from the old Chess records. Interesting years later to hear the early Keith Richards version---slightly different. This was recorded from the radio, at a live benefit concert for the now-defunct Prism Coffeehouse in 1985.
Long Gone A version of the old folk song as done by Lightnin' Hopkins on one of the first albums that Sam Charters recorded of him when he'd quit making records for the "race" market, and was about to enter the folk revival in a big way. I bought this album for about $5 in the "cut-out" bin at Lloyd's Rexall when I was about 13.
Autobio:
I've been playing country blues and other kinds of folk music since high school. Like many professional folklorists, I got into formal folklore studies and eventually became a folklorist through my early interest in blues and other traditional music. I've been singing and playing guitar now for over 35 years, and have had the joy of playing with wonderful traditional blues, country, bluegrass, rock, norteño, R&B, and gospel musicians from all over the country. For me, my guitar is often as important a documentary tool as my notebook,tape recorder and camera.
I grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was exposed to a lot of good music there---blues, rock'n'roll, R&B, jazz, and country, mostly, plus some Yankee-style "folk" music. As a high schooler and then an undergraduate at Virginia, I played in bars, coffeehouses, private parties, and schools. Mostly solo, but occasionally with local folks like Lorraine Duisit (later a founder of Trapezoid), and Pete Spaar, Steve Riggs, and Will Woodard (now all stellar jazz and blues bassists). I also learned a lot by playing roots rock'n'roll with Martin Garrish and the Graveyard Band during summers I spent washing dishes on Ocracoke Island, North Carolina. At the time my rock'n'roll heroes were Ry Cooder, Keith Richards, and Lowell George, but mostly I was listening to Lightnin' Hopkins, Leadbelly, John Lee Hooker, and Mississippi John Hurt.
While at the University of Virginia on the five-and-a-half-year plan, I pretty much taught myself to play guitar from old blues records, or by sitting at the feet of old Virginia Piedmont bluesmen like John Jackson, Turner and Marvin Fodrell, and blind gospel guitarist Daniel Womack. Several of the first blues DJs at WTJU-FM, the protean college "alternative" station, had incredible collections of records (in the era of LPs), and they took me under wing. (Some of my mentors played in now-legendary bands like the Screaming Targets, the Charlottesville Blues Allstars, the Sitting Ducks, Skip Castro, and Johnny Sportcoat and the Casuals.) In the height of the disco and glam eras, I immersed myself in pre-WWII blues and jazz. Not a great career move. Guitar heroes whilst in college: Blind Blake, Tampa Red, Blind Boy Fuller, Robert Johnson, Skip James, Henry Townsend, Blind Willie McTell, Blind Willie Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Django Reinhardt, John Fahey.
After college I taught guitar lessons for a couple of years at the old Guitar Shoppe on Elliewood Avenue on "the Corner". I had a sort of a semi-acoustic blues band going with guitarist Sandy Gray (now of the Hogwaller Ramblers), Dave Grant (now a WTJU DJ and prominent old-time bassist now tragically deceased ), and blues harpist Fulton Patrick. We played a regular gig at Miller's for a couple of years, just before Dave Matthews started hanging out there, I'm told. Around that time I began playing guitar for Ryland Coles and the Gospel Four, one of the best Black gospel quartets in the state. The three or four years I spent playing with them got me sanely through my master's in folklore at Chapel Hill. I learned a lot of vernacular music theory from the Gospel Four, none of whom read music, as far as I know, but all of whom had great talent and knowledge and ability.
After more folklore graduate school at U. Penn., I learned from old-time, gospel and country musicians in western North Carolina and north Georgia, where I was doing fieldwork on the first of several NEA grants. (God Bless the NEA.) I played for a time with a traditional white country gospel group called the Leatherwoods of Cherokee County. I also learned some tunes from elder Georgia fiddler Ross Brown that I still play on guitar, though lately I've been teaching myself to play them on mandolin.
Since then I've done fieldwork in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Tennessee, and South Carolina, and have picked up a few tunes along the way.
Now I'm back home in Virginia. From 2002 to 2008 I was director of the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society. While there I had occasion to play the part of local 1920s cowboy singer Billy Vest in an annual theatrical production.
I am still playing, collecting guitars, and teaching lessons.
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1978.
Photo by Porter Scott, 1978.
Staff folklorist at the John C. Campbell Folk School, 1990.
Independent folklorist, 2001.
Director of the Historical Society, 2006.
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