How To Carve A Thanksgiving Donkey

A piece of Thanksgiving advice from the Donkey: this donkaphonic clip, demonstrates time-tested, perfect carving technique. Stay Donkey!

Spa City Blues Society 2011 Christmas Party – December 3, 2011

Mark your calendar for December 3, 2011, for the Spa City Blues Society 2011 Christmas Party.  The festivities will be held at the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas.  The party will feature performances by the SCBS’s representatives to the 2012 International Blues Challenge – which, in case you’ve been sleeping under a rock – are this very Donkey and the band Clover Blue. 

The party serves a number of purposes.  It will be a fundraiser for the IBC sponsorships.  The SCBS will also be collecting toys for Toys for Tots, so be sure to bring an unwrapped toy to donate.  But most important, the party is an opportunity to support the SCBS, which is vital the Central Arkansas blues scene.  Not only does the SCBS annually sponsor two entrants to the IBC, it organizes the Hot Springs Blues Festival, puts on weekly jams in Hot Springs, and works diligently to keep serious blues played and heard in Hot Springs. 

And lets not forget that you’ll get a chance to hear some music that comes straight from the Low Side of the Road.  I’ll let you make up your own mind about the Donkey, but I can guarantee that Clover Blue is worth the price of admission alone. Red dress, bare back, dancing shoes, shake it!

Doors open at 7:00 p.m., and the music starts at 8:00 p.m.  Tickets are $5.00 for SCBS members and $10.00 for non-members (remember, this is a fundraiser), and you can purchase them in advance at the SCBS website (see the link to the left).  And don’t forget a toy!  (I’ll take a telecaster, please.)

I Want To Sing Like Freddy King!

And really, who doesn't?!

A few weeks ago a member of the donkasphere, Blind Boy White, and I were discussing great blues albums -- not great players, great songs, great performances, but great albums.  The first two to make the list were Magic Sam's "Black Magic" and Freddy King's "Freddy King Sings!"

The majority of the Freddy King collections available cull material from the several albums King recorded for Shelter Records in the late 1960s/early 1970s, and from live recordings of the same period. Those recordings are great, but "Freddy King Sings" is King's very best -- indeed, it is one of the great electric blues albums ever. King's playing and singing are in top form, the band is tight and swingin', the production unobtrusive. King's guitar playing is vibrant and lyrical, and he knows just when to turn it on and get frantic (check out the second half of the Tore Down solo). 


It has been said that Eric Clapton eventually came to play like King.  Perhaps.  But he could never sing like King.  And what really makes this album cook is King's singing. King was a perfect combination of the electric blues singers who came before him -- somewhere between B.B. King, Bobby Bland, and T-Bone Walker -- and the pure timbre of his voice always shakes me down.  Consider: Is there a better blues vocal performance than "Have You Ever Loved A Woman"?


Stay Donkey!   

Brother Ray Jumps Up (Straight Up)

There are records that capture the moment an artist breaks with time and leaps forward and changes everything. Listen to these sides and you hear more than an evolution, something that is more than simply new or different, but altogether unprecedented and better. Visually, it is the equivalent of shooting straight up into the air from a plateau to a precipice that no one knew was there. Think Aretha and “Think”; Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come,” versus everything he did before (“Cupid,” “Bring It On Home”); Dylan and “Like A Rolling Stone.”

That brings us to Brother Ray. I’m working my way through my latest purchase, the 5 CDs that make up “Singular Genius: The Complete ABC Singles.” Ray’s recording career is characterized by these leaps, but the period of 1957 to say, 1961, was particularly fertile. Ray was leaping on a regular basis. “What’d I Say” is an easy and obvious place to start this discussion, but I suggest his wholesale conquest of Hank Snow’s “I’m Movin’ On” is both more interesting and more important. Here we have the driving rhythm and electric piano of “What’d I Say,” but also a bit of steel guitar and, most significantly, a lyric that both “country and western” and, dare I say, chic. Lyrically, the song gets to imagery unlike the places Ray tended to go on his own: “Mister Engineer, take that throttle in hand, take me back to that Southern Land!” And take a Donkey with you!

This foray into “country and western” music was an unforeseeable leap from “What’d I Say,” and, perhaps even more so, from, say, “Swanee River Rock,” recorded just 2 years earlier in May of 1957. So now I’m sitting, standing, grooving, alternately shouting and weeping my through the ABC recordings. Things start strange, and slow. In the liner notes, Billy Vera writes that Ray’s first ABC single, “My Baby (I Love Her Yes I Do)” b/w “Who You Gonna Love” is no better than a couple of Ray’s Atlantic-era B-sides. Vera is wrong. Ray’s Atlantic singles were consistently double-As, and ABC single No. 1 would not have made the cut. Both sides of the single are, in light of everything that came before and everything that would come after, just good, even a bit boring. They do sound like Atlantic-era recordings, and that may well be the problem. Ray had already declared that he was movin’ on.

It’s the third single that changes everything, and we all know what it is: “Georgia On My Mind.” Drawn from Ray’s first session of the 1960s, and his second session for ABC, only Ray could have seen this coming – and that is not a cheap Ray Charles joke. The big, swingin’ R&B horns and Fathead’s honkin’ tenor – gone, exchanged for…strings? The Raylets – gone, exchanged for…a men’s chorus? If I had read about this in the trades I would have resolved that Ray had lost his mind, not to mention his soul, and decided not to bother.

Purely for the purposes of the legend, it would have been better if Brother Ray’s fourth single, “Them That Got,” had been his first. It is drawn from that first, late December 1959, session for ABC, and it is a perfect distillation of RC’s ABC R&B – the Hank Crawford brass section and arrangements; Fathead front and center; the lyric – imaginative, original, funny – but not trite; Ray doing amazing things with his phrasing; and the major-label string orchestra in just the right places. “Them That Got” was a hit, a high water mark, everything that ABC could have hoped for out of Ray, and next to it “Georgia” is still astounding.

As I write this, Sunday before Thanksgiving, I’m working my way towards the end of Disc Two. which covers the 11 singles released between November 1962 and November 1964. The two biggest hits of Ray’s ABC years – Georgia and “Hit the Road Jack” – have already been had, but here’s what arrives during this period: “Your Cheatin’ Heart” b/w “You Are My Sunshine”; “Don’t Set Me Free”; “Take These Chains From My Heart” b/w “No Letter Today”; the majesticly overwhelming “Without Love (There is Nothing)” backed with the soulful late-night burner “No One”; “Busted,” which staked out new territory in Ray’s ownership of “country-western” material; the heartbreaking “That Lucky Old Sun”; “Baby, Don’t You Cry”; and “Smack Dab in the Middle.”

Three discs to go. No reason to believe it will let up. I’ve got much to be thankful for.

Stay Donkey!

Donkey Pictures

Aretha & Piano

Today's listening: a demo recording of "I Never Loved a Man the Way that I Love You."  It's the first cut on "Rare and Unreleased Recordings from the Golden Reign."  While I started out life as a completist, as time passes I'm falling more and more into the camp of, "If it wasn't released in the first place, there's probably a reason."  Time and time again I buy the box set and listen to the alternative takes of some well known masterpiece, and I almost always come away knowing that the right cut was released and the right cut left in the vault.

This cut is a different animal.  It is mostly just Aretha, voice and piano.  Her voice is a bit rough and she is feeling out the song, figuring out the spaces.  That low-down just behind the beat groove is not quite in place.  But those two pieces -- her voice and her piano -- could cool the earth, and the demo setting adds an element of intimacy that is as powerful and honest as anything I've ever heard.  Love is indeed dirty business, lowdown, personal, humiliating, exhilarating, dirty, dirty business.

Stay Donkey.

Gearing up for IBC 2012

The Donkey has been saddled with the honor of representing the Spa City Blues Society in the solo/duo category at the 2012 International Blues Challenge in Memphis.

Today I submitted my registration.  I can guarantee that I have never sweated so much over 600 characters, or over whether my picture was 900X600 at 300 dpi.  I'm a lowdown swamp donkey, after all!  What do I know about dpi?  But we do these things on pain of losing an all important single point in the competition, and I know from previous experience that every point matters.  You can check out all entrants at the IBC website, http://www.blues.org/.

And my 600 characters (not counting spaces, fortunately)?  Here they are:

Down at the Ohio Club on Central Avenue in Hot Springs, Arkansas, Ben “Swamp Donkey” Brenner slings his National guitar. We are on the low side of the road, where Dylan meets the Delta and Big Bill and R.L. Burnside share a bottle. The Donkey digs in, works his slide, plays another song. Notes roll and tumble and slide into the wild American night. “The blues,” he sings, “ain’t nothin’ but a good Donkey totin’ too much load. Don’t confuse me for no mule!”  The juke approves, and you are drawn to a woman you can’t not look at, red dress, bare back, one arm up, all hips. She is getting Donkey. This is the music of bluesabilly kings and tonkeyhonk queens. It’s Donkey time. You should get Donkey too.