I don't often see video of harp players these days that makes me sit straight up in my chair, but that's what happened with this video. I've heard about Harmonica Frank Floyd for years--Mississippi-born, white, from the hill country not far from here, a guy Honeyboy Edwards talks about fondly in his autobiography. But I didn't realize that there was good color video footage of him. I know that some players, including Rick Estrin, can play the harp with no hands, sticking it sideways into their mouth like a cigar, but the way Floyd does that here, tracking the changes that he's playing on his guitar, is what gets me excited. For harp players, the first song is priceless footage. You assume that he's playing harp on a rack....and then you realize that...holy cr-p, he's not:
Looks like the harmonica he was using is perhaps the old Hohner Orchester, which would make sense because the tines on that model would have been perfect for this method of playing. They were comfortable and were covered with some type of metallic, foil-like material which would have probably helped avoid swelling. I have one in C around here somewhere.
He sang the dirtiest song ever sung, Shampoo. It has nothing to do with shampoo. He just says "shampoo" to clean up the lyrics, seriously. He was picked by Sam Phillips to be the original Elvis. When he first had the idea to find a white guy that sounded like a black guy, he first cast Frank in that role. When that didn't work, he went to Elvis. He lived the ultimate blues life. His parents left him and didn't even love him enough to give him a damn name before they abandoned him. He grew up in a sharecropping household. Harmonica Frank was one of the very first Rock n' Roll musicians, he traveled around quite a bit during the folks revival playing at colleges and whatnot.
This is one of his records from the 1950s.
Shampoo is a very explicit song. It was probably the most explicit song ever recorded when he released it in 1972. It's raunchy enough, I'm not gonna embed it. You gotta click. Make sure kids are out of the room and don't click if you are easily offended. It easily offends. he even gets into bestiality at the end. It's really, really raunchy. Click here for Shampoo
---------- David
____________________ At the time of his birth, it was widely accepted that no one man could play that much music so well or raise that much hell. He proved them all wrong. R.I.P. H. Cecil Payne
@Elk: Jesus! That's right up there with "Shave 'em Dry." Was that song actually released, or is that an unreleased studio master? I have to believe the latter. That's crazy.
I'm sure folks sang that sort of song to each other, late at night, when the whiskey came out and the kids had been put to bed, but that sort of stuff usually doesn't make it onto records.
Hell yeah it was released.., not at Sun, mind you. It was on an EP. Small label. Once heard, that song cannot be unheard. ---------- David
____________________ At the time of his birth, it was widely accepted that no one man could play that much music so well or raise that much hell. He proved them all wrong. R.I.P. H. Cecil Payne
Last Edited by on Dec 06, 2012 4:36 PM