Letters from Radio Quotidia the Blues 4

Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 4 of The Blues, 15 minutes, give or take, of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the helm. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while. As I say, the theme this month is the blues.

And we’ll start with a guitarist, Albert King, who was a bit of an enigma, maybe even a little bit shady. This guy stood well over 6 foot tall and weighed in at 250 lbs, drove a bulldozer for his day job, stole B. B. King’s nickname, blues boy, and had the audacity to call his guitar Lucy, knowing that BB called his Lucille! Oh, and he claimed to be B.B. King’s brother. B.B. later said: He called his guitar ‘Lucy,’ and for a while he went around saying he was my brother. That bothered me until I got to know him and realized he was right; he wasn’t my brother in blood, but he sure was my brother in the blues.

Now B.B. King I revered from my mid-teens in the mid-sixties.  When he sang, nobody loves me but my mother, and she could be jivin’ too! I was hooked. I was one of the many teens of that era that sought out the genuine American art form that was the blues, in the wake of our heroes hailing from Britain: the Beatles, of course, and the Stones, who this month are releasing the first album in 18 years- and don’t you love their single from that album- Angry?– yeah, you may talk about  angry old men but Mick, Keith and Ronnie were laughing as they launched Hackney Diamonds with Jimmy Fallon in London last month.

But back to the sixties- there was also John Mayall, Cream, and  the original Fleetwood Mac among many others, and let us not neglect the land of my birth- Ireland producing Rory Gallagher with Taste and Van Morrison with Them. I used to play Born Under a Bad Sign on my first electric, a Burns short-scale jazz guitar when I was in residence at Trench House- to the annoyance of those benighted souls who did not appreciate the Blues. That guitar, as I previously mentioned, I ended up pawning to pay my rent arrears when I moved out for bedsitter land in Belfast the following year. Here is my version of Albert King’s Born Under a Bad Sign that knocked me out when I first heard it in 1967. [insert Song]

I’ve always admired the Blues for its refusal to descend to mawkish sentimentality in the face of the challenges thrown up by society and the world at large. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is the matter, ever-changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe does not need finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance. So says, Zora Neale Hurston (born in 1891, who died in 1960): part of the Harlem Renaissance she was a contrarian to say the least, a deeply conservative Republican, but militantly atheist daughter of a Baptist preacher father, this  anthropologist, author, and filmmaker produced a considerable body of work but ended her life in poverty and obscurity like so many talented African American artists.

She embodies the blues- no self-pitying here. I’m not sure if she was familiar with the song that closes this episode, Sittin’ on Top of the World, but I reckon she would have approved of its approach to life. It  is a country blues song written by Walter Vinson and Lonnie Chatmon. They were core members of the Mississippi Sheiks who recorded it in 1930. Vinson claimed to have composed the song one morning after playing at a white dance in Greenwood, Mississippi. Sittin’ on Top of the World has become a standard of traditional American music. The song has been described as a simple, elegant distillation of the Blues. In 2018, it was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally, historically, or artistically significant. Here’s my version of the song. [insert song] Now a bonus track, Oh Pretty Woman, another gem from Albert King’s repertoire

Credits: All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.