A lot of feeling in this one. Singing starts about 40 seconds in. Maybe not blues but it grabs me every time. I post it in this thread because he may not be one of the usual suspects...
I think the element that puts the ooze in the blues singing is black gospel,all the great blues singers have that gospel in them since they were kids !!!!!!!
Also, here's a young guy who only just started releasing music recently. He reminds me a lot of Sam Cooke, if you all are into that sound. Leon Bridges:
---------- Check out my music at http://bmeyerson11.bandcamp.com/
What I don't much like is people who mock or burlesque the music even as they sing it. I hear enough of this among contemporary white blues singers that I've taken note of it as one fairly common aspect of white blues performance -Kudzu runner
i think people are doing a great job of sharing what they believe are sincere singers.
but can i get a gripe off my chest? my pet peeve is fake voice.especially white people who try to sound like old black people,"because they're singing the blues" but i also can't stand kermit voice,or hillbilly voices on yankees,etc.
but i reALLY WANT TO AIR ONE of my least favorite things.i have come across this way too many times.
when ,say,a white female folk singer(but it could be anybody) thinks they know the blues. and they moan very loudly throughout the song. like moan over solos of other people or moan during someone's vocals beside their own.
what the heck do they do that for? agh!!!
ok,rant over.
my vote is for otis redding. ---------- www.shakeylee.com
I don't deny Joplin's real emotion and the sheer power of her performances, but I have always found her next to unlistenable.Hers was the 60s counter culture insistence to "let it all hang out", because, after all, refinement, style, a knowledge of technique was for squares.Underlying that thinking was a larger critique against the post war culture of 50s America, but with regards to Joplin, hers is a misconception that the melismatic , gospel informed style of black American singers was about being primal, loud, raspy, unrestrained. She let it all go in emulation of the singers she loved and became, in her eagerness to express her need to find love and be strong, came perilously close to being an outright parody of the real thing. Her vocals do nothing for me except to remind me that a singer constantly pitched at the edge of hysteria stops being exciting very quickly and becomes monotonous. ---------- Ted Burke __________________ ted-burke.com tburke4@san.rr.com
She let it all hang out for the audiences 'cause thats what they wanted to hear and that was her shtick She was dead by 27 so who knows how she would have matured- she certainly had ability
Hendrix was almost always out of tune live but it didnt make him any less exciting or ground breaking
You are looking back at another world as an old man-and maybe forgetting what it was like to BE there..
"You are looking back at another world as an old man-and maybe forgetting what it was like to BE there.."
Forgive me, but that's a little off base. I've always thought that about Joplin; I grew up in Detroit until I was eighteen and by that time had absorbed the best of Aretha, Motown, Stax Volt and had a pretty solid idea of what Great blues and r and b singing was. I remember precisely and exactly what it was like to BE THERE and I remember what I thought at the time I saw her at the Grande Ballroom. I did care for most of what she did. I am of that time, I was formed by that time, but not everything was good. Not everything was to my taste. Joplin oversang and it grated. It's that simple. ---------- Ted Burke __________________ ted-burke.com tburke4@san.rr.com
"I don't deny Joplin's real emotion and the sheer power of her performances, but I have always found her next to unlistenable.Hers was the 60s counter culture insistence to "let it all hang out", because, after all, refinement, style, a knowledge of technique was for squares.Underlying that thinking was a larger critique against the post war culture of 50s America, but with regards to Joplin, hers is a misconception that the melismatic , gospel informed style of black American singers was about being primal, loud, raspy, unrestrained. She let it all go in emulation of the singers she loved and became, in her eagerness to express her need to find love and be strong, came perilously close to being an outright parody of the real thing. Her vocals do nothing for me except to remind me that a singer constantly pitched at the edge of hysteria stops being exciting very quickly and becomes monotonous."
I completely agree with you, Ted. I've always had exactly the same reaction to Joplin.
I think her most memorable performance is "Mercedes Benz." What she's doing there is burlesquing the white trash folk she came from--people whose values in some ways she'd moved very far away from, but people she knew intimately, for all that. She's singing in a put-on redneck-woman voice. It's classic burlesque: she's mocking it, but she means it. White double consciousness.
None of this was apparent to me the first time I heard the song, or the tenth or 50th time. But over time I slowly figured out what made it work. She knows "those people"--their thoughts, their feelings, their austerity and asperity--and all that shapes her aesthetics.
With blues, yes: she thought it was enough just to open up her breastplate and beam. And it's not nearly enough. Power in reserve is the mark of every great blues performer.
but the challenge was someone who sings the blues like they really mean it... Joplin could have been a hell of an actor and fooled lots of people.. but regardless of if you like her style.. she meant it.. watching her off mic you can see how completely immersed in the music she was.. she could hold back some at times... i think this is what gets some people about Ricci, he is so intense they can't take it.. but why i am so taken by his music.. even seen him live.. he totally means it..
so you could put all kinds of layers of meaning/ parody/ burlesque on summertime.. but i don't think that is her intent at all here.. just to sing her heart out.. you can hear the pain. the love of the music, all of that, and that is what she seems to be after
Walter, your point is extremely well-taken, and it leads me to offer a corollary: it is possible to be a bad/ineffective/tasteless blues singer who really means it. Just "meaning it" isn't enough. You need something like technique--to sing blues, you need a sense of the microtonal subtleties that Muddy and Bessie, for example, were such masters of--and you need an aesthetic sense that, as Ted has pointed out, doesn't confuse pure fierce unbuckled expressiveness with actually communicating emotion.
A little child with a broken heart, sobbing and sobbing, really feels it and really means it. But that's not blues singing.
The above statement is obviously the reductio ad absurdum of this particular debate, but you get my point.
Still, a little technique and a whole lot of meaning it can take a singer far in the blues world.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Jun 02, 2015 4:48 AM
I remember seeing Janis before she became a big star and after. When I saw her after John Hammond opened for her but the people kept yelling Janis during his set. It was a bit sad for me. ----------
Three singers of blues who I think bring it home quite well:
Robert Cray: tasty guitarist with an Albert Collins bent, Cray is also a great vocalist; he has a Sam Cooke ache in his tone that is very effective.
Michael Hill: Hill is a blues guitarist in a blues-rock mode ala Hendrix and SRV, but he sings with a lilt that recalls Percy Mayfield. Very effective combination.
Mose Allison: Unique pianist, major songwriter, Allison as well is a unique vocalist , having a limited but especially effective voice that is talk-sung , with odd emphasis and off kilter phrasing giving a cool, ironic feel to his style of off hand wit and wisdom as regards tales of hard luck. The quintessence of cool. ---------- Ted Burke __________________ http://www.yourURL.com tburke4@san.rr.com
I'll admit that some of Janis' singing can be a little screchy, but I don't hear any of what Ted and Kudzu are bitching about on this song. I've listened to a number of other covers of this including Joan Baez' version and the version by the writer himself Kris Kristofferson, and for me none comes close to Janis'.
I thank the musical gods daily for my apparently pedestrian ears and taste.
Oh yeah, and Robert Cray is the exact opposite of a guy who sounds like he means it,
@Honkin Re Cray, maybe try "These Things" "Gotta Make a Comeback" "Help Me to Forget". He certainly holds back much of the time, but he can deliver imo
