Music 70s and earlier

[Tharmas]

Don't get me started on Otis Spann:

 

[Thomas II]

 

[thebeave]

Saw Janis in a small club in New York just before the first album was released and she became famous.

My ex BIL once told me a story about when he was in high school in the mid-60's in the Bay Area. There was some sort of concert event at a local bowling alley (I know, right?), with various Bay Area singers and dancing that he and his buddies went to. During the dance, his friend pulled him aside, and said, "Man, I just danced with this really ugly girl". Turned out to be Janis Joplin, who later on took the stage. She wasn't much of a looker, but that girl had some singing chops!

Edited to Add: After having googled at a bit, I think it was not a local Bay Area bowling alley he was referring to, but this:

The Timeless Headliners of the Kings Beach Bowl

Over the course of two summers in the late 1960s, a chunk of the Haight Ashbury psychedelic rock scene was picked up and dropped off in Kings Beach at the building we now know as the North Tahoe Event Center. A converted bowling alley with 10-foot ceilings, the building was then a concert venue called Kings Beach Bowl that hosted the likes of Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, Neil Young with Buffalo Springfield, Country Joe and the Fish, and the Grateful Dead — to name a few.

 

[Elixir]

I was at the concert at the Fillmore that became the album. I didn’t know they were recording, but thought it a little odd that everyone on the stage was utterly motionless, never even looking up while Janis was jumping all around. You can hear a glass breaking on the album- it almost hit me in the foot.*
Janis used to play pool and drink heavily in a little bar in North Beach where I’d go when I had fake ID … forget the name of the bar but hard to forget the drunken broad….

* hearing it on the album was my first clue that they had been recording

 

[thebeave]

Check my revised post above. Did you ever go to North Lake Tahoe to the converted bowling alley?

 

[Elixir]

Check my revised post above. Did you ever go to North Lake Tahoe to the converted bowling alley?

No … only heard about it.

 

[steve_bank]

THANK YOU Steve, for bringing up the true origins of American popular music. Folk, Country, Blues, Rock and Roll, even Punk, Metal and headbanger crap all owe a debt to the people above. FWIW I thought Bobby Blue was a pretentious punk, Chuck Berry was a scumbag and BB King was a one-lick wonder at the time. But Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf ... back to Leadbelly - those were the OG.

I think Clapton is a poser proficient in technique but no soul. Most of the rock musicians with exceptions were musically ignorant.

You can trace the riiffs of the 60s guitarists directly to black recordings from 30s -50s. In particular there was a Library Of Congress recording of Robert Johnson. Alan Lomax went around recording in rural America in particular the Mississippi Delta.

The white Brish Yardbirds did a pathetic version of Manish Boy. Muddy Waters sang the song about expressng black male pride and sexuality at a time when doing so in public in places coud get a black man killed. There is a context to black music.

If you look deep enough you will find black music influenced what used to be called country music.

As to folk, I suppose the Weavers were a major influence.....

If you know what you are listening to, Elvis was a gospel singer. Rhythms and betas came out of black gospel muisc.

As to Bo Diddly, the consevative Christians said the black 'jungle music' would destroy America. Maybe they will be right