EARL SILAS JOHNSON IV, THE BLUES KING OF LOUISIANA

Today, The Grandma has been listening some music. She has chosen Early King, the American singer, guitarist, and songwriter, who died on a day like today in 2003.

Earl Silas Johnson IV (February 7, 1934-April 17, 2003), known as Earl King, was an American singer, guitarist, and songwriter, most active in blues music.

A composer of blues standards such as Come On (covered by Jimi Hendrix, Freddie King, Stevie Ray Vaughan) and Big Chief (recorded by Professor Longhair), he was an important figure in New Orleans R&B.

King was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. His father was a piano player. He died when Earl was still a baby, and Earl was brought up by his mother. With his mother, he started going to church at an early age. In his youth he sang gospel music, but he took the advice of a friend to switch to blues to make a better living.

King started to play the guitar at the age of 15. Soon he started entering talent contests at local clubs, including the Dew Drop Inn. At one such club he met his idol, Guitar Slim.

King started imitating Slim, and his presence had a big impact on his musical direction. In 1954, Slim was injured in an automobile accident, right around the time he had the number 1 R&B hit The Things That I Used To Do, and King was deputized to continue a tour with Slim's band, representing himself as Slim. After succeeding in this role, King became a regular at the Dew Drop Inn.

More information: Los Angeles Times

His first recording was made in 1953. As Earl Johnson, he released a 78-rpm record, Have You Gone Crazy/Begging at Your Mercy, for Savoy Records.

The following year, the talent scout Johnny Vincent introduced King to Specialty Records, for which he recorded some sides, including Mother's Love, which was locally popular. In 1955, King signed with Vincent's label, Ace.

His first single for that label, Those Lonely, Lonely Nights, was a hit, reaching number 7 on the Billboard R&B chart. He continued to record for Ace for the next five years. During that time, he also he started writing songs for other artists, such as Roland Stone and Jimmy Clanton.

In 1960, Dave Bartholomew invited King to record for Imperial Records. In sessions for that label, he was backed by a host of musicians, including Bob French, George French, James Booker, and Wardell Quezergue. It was at this label he recorded his signature songs Come On and Trick Bag.

The former has been a much-covered standard for decades, notably recorded by Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Anson Funderburgh. The latter has also been widely covered, with versions by Johnny Winter, the Meters and Robert Palmer. King co-wrote a number of songs with Bartholomew, either under his own name or under the pseudonym E.C. King.

King recorded for Imperial until 1963. He went without a recording contract for the rest of the 1960s. During this time, he mostly concentrated on producing and songwriting for the local labels NOLA and Watch. His compositions from this era include Big Chief, recorded by Professor Longhair; Teasin' You, recorded by Willie Tee; and Do-Re-Mi, recorded by Lee Dorsey.

He went to Detroit for an audition with Motown Records and recorded a few tracks in the mid-1960s. Three tracks from that session are included on the album Motown's Blue Evolution, released in 1996.

More information: The Bitter Southerner

In 1972, he was joined by Allen Toussaint and the Meters to record the album Street Parade. Atlantic Records initially showed interest in releasing it but eventually declined. The title track was released as a single on the Kansu label at the time, but the rest was unrelesed until 1982, when the album was issued by Charly Records in the UK.

In the 1970s, he recorded another album, That Good Old New New Orleans Rock 'n Roll, which was released by Sonet in 1977. He also appeared on the album New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival 1976.

In the early 1980s, King met Hammond Scott, the co-owner of Black Top Records, and started to record for the label.

The first album Glazed, on which he was backed by Roomful of Blues, was released in 1986. This particular album was nominated for a Grammy Award. A second album, Sexual Telepathy, released in 1990, featured Snooks Eaglin on two tracks and backing by Ronnie Earl & The Broadcasters on some tracks. He recorded his third album for Black Top, Hard River to Cross (1993), with backing by George Porter, Jr., David Torkanowsky, and Herman V. Ernest III.

In 2001, King was hospitalized for an illness during a tour of New Zealand, but that did not stop him from performing. In December of the same year, he toured Japan, and he continued to perform off and on locally in New Orleans until his death.

King died on April 17, 2003, from diabetes-related complications, just a week before the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. His funeral was held on April 30, during the festival, and many musicians attended it, including Dr. John, Leo Nocentelli and Aaron Neville.

His Imperial recordings, which had long been out of print, were reissued on CD soon after he died. The June 2003 issue of OffBeat, a local music magazine, paid tribute to King with a series of articles on him.

More information: Owl Tail

Most people say, 'Well, Earl, you sing the blues,'
or however they want to categorize it.
I just sing songs.

Earl King

MAHALIA JACKSON, GOSPEL BLUES & CIVIL RIGHTS

Today, The Grandma is relaxing at home. She has decided to listen to some music, and she has chosen Mahalia Jackson's songs, the American gospel singer who was born on a day like today in 1911.

Mahalia Jackson (born Mahala Jackson; October 26, 1911-January 27, 1972) was an American gospel singer, widely considered one of the most influential vocalists of the 20th century.

With a career spanning 40 years, Jackson was integral to the development and spread of gospel blues in black churches throughout the U.S. during a time when racial segregation was pervasive in American society, she met considerable and unexpected success in a recording career, selling an estimated 22 million records and performing in front of integrated and secular audiences in concert halls around the world.

The granddaughter of enslaved people, Jackson was born and raised in poverty in New Orleans. She found a home in her church, leading to a lifelong dedication and singular purpose to deliver God's word through song.

She moved to Chicago as an adolescent and joined the Johnson Singers, one of the earliest gospel groups. Jackson was heavily influenced by blues' singer Bessie Smith, adapting her style to traditional Protestant hymns and contemporary songs. After making an impression in Chicago churches, she was hired to sing at funerals, political rallies, and revivals. For 15 years, she functioned as what she termed a fish and bread singer, working odd jobs between performances to make a living.

Nationwide recognition came for Jackson in 1947 with the release of Move On Up a Little Higher, selling two million copies and hitting the number two spot on Billboard charts, both firsts for gospel music.

More information: NPR

Jackson's recordings captured the attention of jazz fans in the U.S. and France, and she became the first gospel recording artist to tour Europe. She regularly appeared on television and radio, and performed for many presidents and heads of state, including singing the national anthem at John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Ball in 1961.

Motivated by her experiences living and touring in the South and integrating a Chicago neighbourhood, she participated in the civil rights movement, singing for fundraisers and at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. She was a vocal and loyal supporter of Martin Luther King, Jr. and a personal friend of his family.

Mahalia Jackson was born to Charity Clark and Johnny Jackson, a stevedore and weekend barber. Clark and Jackson were unmarried, a common arrangement among black women in New Orleans at the time. He lived elsewhere, never joining Charity as a parent. Both sets of Mahalia's grandparents were born into slavery, her paternal grandparents on a rice plantation and her maternal grandparents on a cotton plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish about 160 km north of New Orleans.

Throughout her career, Jackson faced intense pressure to record secular music, but turned down high-paying opportunities to concentrate on gospel. Completely self-taught, Jackson had a keen sense of instinct for music, her delivery marked by extensive improvisation with melody and rhythm.

She was renowned for her powerful contralto voice, range, an enormous stage presence, and her ability to relate to her audiences, conveying and evoking intense emotion during performances.

 

Passionate and at times frenetic, she wept and demonstrated physical expressions of joy while singing.

 

Her success brought about international interest in gospel music, initiating the Golden Age of Gospel making it possible for many soloists and vocal groups to tour and record. 

 

Popular music as a whole felt her influence, and she is credited with inspiring rhythm and blues, soul, and rock and roll singing styles.

In a very cold December, Jackson arrived in Chicago. For a week she was miserably homesick, unable to move off the couch until Sunday when her aunts took her to Greater Salem Baptist Church, an environment she felt at home in immediately, later stating it was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me.

Jackson's arrival in Chicago occurred during the Great Migration, a massive movement of black Southerners to Northern cities. Between 1910 and 1970, hundreds of thousands of rural Southern blacks moved to Chicago, transforming a neighbourhood in the South Side into Bronzeville, a black city within a city which was mostly self-sufficient, prosperous, and teeming in the 1920s. This movement caused white flight, with whites moving to suburbs, leaving established white churches and synagogues with dwindling members. Their mortgages were taken over by black congregations in good position to settle in Bronzeville. Members of these churches were, in Jackson's term, society Negroes who were well-educated and eager to prove their successful assimilation into white American society. Musical services tended to be formal, presenting solemnly delivered hymns written by Isaac Watts and other European composers. Shouting and clapping were generally not allowed as they were viewed as undignified. Special programs and musicals tended to feature sophisticated choral arrangements to prove the quality of the choir.

In 1937, Jackson met Mayo "Ink" Williams, a music producer who arranged a session with Decca Records. She recorded four singles: God's Gonna Separate the Wheat From the Tares, You Sing On, My Singer, God Shall Wipe Away All Tears, and Keep Me Every Day.

A constant worker and a shrewd businesswoman, Jackson became the choir director at St. Luke Baptist Church. She bought a building as a landlord, then found the salon so successful she had to hire help to care for it when she travelled on weekends.

More information: Television Academy Foundation

Each engagement Jackson took was farther from Chicago in a non-stop string of performances.

In 1946, she appeared at the Golden Gate Ballroom in Harlem. In attendance was Art Freeman, a music scout for Apollo Records, a company catering to black artists and audiences, concentrating mostly on jazz and blues.

Her first release on Apollo, Wait 'til My Change Comes backed with I'm Going to Tell God All About it One of These Days did not sell well. Neither did her second, I Want to Rest with He Knows My Heart. Berman asked Jackson to record blues and she refused. Berman told Freeman to release Jackson from any more recordings, but Freeman asked for one more session to record the song Jackson sang as a warm-up at the Golden Gate Ballroom concert. Move On Up a Little Higher was recorded in two parts, one for each side of the 78 rpm record.

As Jackson's singing was often considered jazz or blues with religious lyrics, she fielded questions about the nature of gospel blues and how she developed her singing style.

In 1954, Jackson learned that Berman had been withholding royalties and had allowed her contract with Apollo to expire. Mitch Miller offered her a $50,000-a-year (equivalent to $480,000 in 2021) four-year contract, and Jackson became the first gospel artist to sign with Columbia Records, a much larger company with the ability to promote her nationally.

Columbia worked with a local radio affiliate in Chicago to create a half hour radio program, The Mahalia Jackson Show. She appeared on a local television program, also titled The Mahalia Jackson Show, which again got a positive reception but was cancelled for lack of sponsors. Despite white people beginning to attend her shows and sending fan letters, executives at CBS were concerned they would lose advertisers from Southern states who objected to a program with a black person as the primary focus.

More information: Essence

Jackson broke into films playing a missionary in St. Louis Blues (1958), and a funeral singer in Imitation of Life (1959).

While attending the National Baptist Convention in 1956, Jackson met Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, both ministers emerging as organizers protesting segregation.

As gospel music became more popular -primarily due to her influencesingers began appearing at non-religious venues as a way to spread a Christian message to non-believers.

Jackson toured Europe again in 1964, mobbed in several cities and proclaiming, I thought I was the Beatles!, in Utrecht. She appeared in the film The Best Man (1964).

Jackson's recovery took a full year, during which she was unable to tour or record, ultimately losing 23 kg. From this point on she was plagued with near-constant fatigue, bouts of tachycardia, and high blood pressure as her condition advanced.

She was once more heartbroken upon learning of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She attended the funeral in Atlanta where she gave one of her most memorable performances of Take My Hand, Precious Lord. With this, Jackson retired from political work and personal endorsements.

While touring Europe months later, Jackson became ill in Germany and flew home to Chicago where she was hospitalized. In January 1972, she received surgery to remove a bowel obstruction and died in recovery.

More information: Go Nola

 Faith and prayer are the vitamins of the soul;
man cannot live in health without them.

Mahalia Jackson

BLUES: AMERICAN CHORDS OF SADNESS & MELANCHOLY

Blues was born in Mississippi Delta

Blues is a genre and musical form originated by African Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the end of the 19th century. The genre developed from roots in African-American work songs and European-American folk music. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The blues form, ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues and rock and roll, is characterized by the call-and-response pattern, the blues scale and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes or worried notes, usually thirds or fifths flattened in pitch, are also an important part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove.

More information: American Blues Scene

Blues as a genre is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the AAB pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars. Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating the troubles experienced in African-American society.

More information: Blue Radio Stations

Many elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa. The origins of the blues are also closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community, the spirituals. The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after the ending of slavery and, later, the development of juke joints. It is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves.

More information: National Blues Museum of Sant Louis, Missouri

Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century. The first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a wide variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres include country blues, such as Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues and West Coast blues. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called blues rock evolved.

B.B.KING

B.B.King in a concert

Riley B. King (September 16, 1925 – May 14, 2015), known professionally as B.B. King, was an American blues singer, electric guitarist, songwriter, and record producer. King introduced a sophisticated style of soloing based on fluid string bending and shimmering vibrato that influenced many later electric blues guitarists.

King was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, and is considered one of the most influential blues musicians of all time, earning the nickname The King of the Blues, and one of the "Three Kings of the Blues Guitar" along with Albert King and Freddie King. King was known for performing tirelessly throughout his musical career, appearing at more than 200 concerts per year on average into his 70s. In 1956, he reportedly appeared at 342 shows.

On May 14, 2015, King died and his body was flown to Memphis. The funeral procession led down Beale Street, with a brass band marching in front of the hearse, playing When the Saints Go Marching In, as mourners called out BB. Rodd Bland, son of the late blues singer Bobby Blue Bland, carried the latest iteration of King's famous guitar Lucille. Thousands lined the streets to pay their last respects. His body was then driven down Route 61 to his hometown of Indianola, Mississippi.

More information: B.B.King

I was born on a plantation, and things weren't so good. 

We didn't have any money. I never thought of the word 'poor' 'til 

I got to be a man, but when you live in a house 

that you can always peek out of and see what kind of day it is, 

you're not doing so well.

 B.B.King