BABY PLEASE DON'T GO, AGAIN

What's particularly interesting about these songs, inherent in the volume and time span of recordings, is how the many versions illustrate the shifting styles of prewar country blues, to Chicago blues, and ultimately R&B and rock. And that the British invasion was largely responsible for bringing blues back into the pop idiom or at least back to the white market. The rise of the Animals, Them, the Stones, meant producers and A&R men saw dollar signs beyond the black working class audience blues based music was understood to be limited to. As is the case today the teen market = the big bucks. As blues and R&B rose in stature deep soul (southern soul, soul with more explicit blues and r&b qualities) was no longer regarded as niche music. In my sort of naively post-racial understanding of musical history I had never realized just how segregated music remained, as with everything else, well into and beyond the mythic utopia of the sixties.

TURN YOUR LAMP DOWN LOW

From wikipedia...

Baby, Please Don't Go" is a blues song first recorded by Big Joe Williams in 1935. It is related to a group of early 20th century blues and work songs that include "Alabama Bound", "Another Man Done Gone", and "Don't Leave Me Here", and "Turn Your Lamp Down Low"

Big Joe Williams - Baby, please Don't Go(1935 original)
Big Joe Williams - Baby Please Don't Go (1945)
Butch Cage & Willie B Thomas - Baby Please Don't Go
Bukka White - Baby Please Don't Go
Mississippi Fred McDowell - Baby Please Don't Go
Vera Ward Hall - Another Man Done Gone
Henry Thomas - Don't Leave Me Here
Big Joe Williams - Don't Leave Me Here.mp3
Them - Baby Please Don't Go
John Lee Hooker & Van Morrison - Baby Please Don't Go

MUXTAPED

I uploaded some new songs to muxtape.

listen

ADDENDUM

Upon greater reflection, I've been unfair to Ms. Nash, in that she is but a tiny piece of a much bigger and grosser context. And while I don't want to be listening to her music, neither am I interested in the alternative I seemed to have suggested she default to (self serious emotionalism). I suppose what's obnoxious to me is that these little tricks of non-committal meta-song interruption seem favorable enough to audiences, for instance, college kids hosting radio shows, into deciding Kate Nash or Jason Schwartzman (the song West Coast, also a campus hit), or Yael Naim, are more honest or interesting or otherwise credible than the monolithic mainstream that they are most formally aligned with.

I don't mean this as a "fuck those tasteless college kids." I simply find it interesting, and frustrating, that there's a serious commercial market that has sprung from, in part, the indie rock idiom, marketing music to the moderately contrary youth, and this youth market still recognizes something of themselves in this stuff. Or maybe they just like those catchy beats.

But the indie rock self-consciousness was grating enough when coupled with an often imaginative musical freedom and invention and the righteousness of a reactionary alternative and autonomy.