Just about every other blues song makes me wanna grab a harp and play along but 'driftin and driftin' makes me pull my headphones on, lie back and let the music wash over me.
Oh, and I feckin love 'who's makin love' by the Blues Brothers!
i call the blues "a good man feeling bad" low pay, long hours, working in the hot sun, and your women ran off with your best friend. (thats what i call the blues)
Last Edited by on Oct 04, 2011 3:46 PM
there have been so many songs written about blues by people with the blues. me included. but one feature and saving grace of blues music is that, not only does the genre help one define what one is feeling, it also provides a way to turn the depth of sadness into heights of joy. blues to me is taken right out of real life. most of us will never have to experience what the early blues masters- son house, robert j., petway, perkins, and so many others, had to live through. still, many of us in this day and age can provide a reflection of that deep dark place that waits for us just around a corner.
the real-est blues i have ever heard are the ones direct from your or my experience. i have absolutely been schooled and inspired by my heroes in blues and the list is long. but the most intense, that hit me the deepest, has been the stuff straight from your heart or my heart. ---------- http://www.reverbnation.com/jawboneandjolene
Mmmmmmm It can't just be the subject.. sad subjects abound in every genre of music Classical has some of the 'saddest' melodies around It can't just be the rythym..or syncopation..or'beat' It can't be just the 'blue' notes as they are used in other musical forms ,as are the 1 1V V. Phew!
Well, "I know a blues when i hear one" is about where it's at for me ;-)
I listen to a lot of blues. I know what I like and what I don't like. Blues is primarily a vocal art form. What I like features some singers than I consider to be souful vocalists. Everything else has to support the vocalist.
I consider Otis Spann to be a top notch vocalist and very emotive singer. Robert Lockwood is the perfect accompanist. What he plays tends to be perfect and highly supportive of the vocalist.
I've been buying blues records for over 30 years. I know what moves me. I break from the group. I don't dig everything harmonica. I'm a blues freak. I listen to a lot of music without harmonica on it, but it is almost all blues or southern soul.
Rollin' Stone by Muddy Waters Baby Don't You Love Me No More by Leroy Carr (I think that is what it is called) Evil by Howlin' Wolf There's A Man Goin' Around Taking Names by Josh White Jumping At Shadows by Duster Bennett (I have to thank these forums for this one) Dark Was the Night by Blind Willie Johnson
These are my top songs that kinda shape what I think the blues are. I am sure as soon as I post this, I'll think of some more.
2:19 (aka Mamie's Blues) Buddy Bolden's Blues (aka Funky Butt) Yellow Dog Blues St. Louis Blues Sweet Home Kokomo (or Baltimore or Chicago) Catfish Blues Sitting on Top of the World Basin Street Blues Beale Street Blues Birth of the Blues Now's the Time Blues for Alice
@Rich driftin` blues by butterfield is definitely great blues @Bugsy fleetwood mac with peter greene on vocals and fantastic lead guitar doing jumping @ shadows is pretty awesome and boz skaggs doing somebody loan me a dime with duane allman playing lead guitar is great blues
It's cropped up a couple of times in this thread already and I never really get it. Why do people think the blues is just about hardship and misery?
(Some) blues might have been born out of hardship and misery, but within this music is the full range of human emotion in all its uplifting, devotional, bragging, humorous, sleazy, innuendo-filled glory
I still like Jbones post best. Its not what songs people have already done. Blues is an emotion. It's how you play music because it's how you feel. So it's different from person to person. As far recordings go. I like the early Muddy Waters field recordings by Alan Lomax. The way he played the guitar and sang is a lost art.
No song I have ever heard uses the blues the way this song does...it is totally about the blues...listen to the words and how many times the word blues is actually used. To me...this is a blues as blues can get.
True story. At the Tuesday night jam last night some guy we've never seen before gets up and does an impromptu slow blues vocal 'cause his wife left him last Friday. That's the blues...
I've got a Junior Wells CD ("An Introduction to Junior Wells", Stoney Plain Records) that has some live "bonus" tracks of Junior and Buddy Guy and the band playing Help Me and Look Over Yonders Wall. That live band, and extended version stuff really does it for me. ----------
