OT: Blues collection share thread

[HornedFrog Purple]

I thought I would start this up for the few of us that were talking about it in another thread.

I am working on making mp3s of Henry Thomas, a old Texas bluesman I love listening to. I have two of his records (they are 78's) that are 1927 and 1929. I am putting them at 128 in mono since there's no point in stereo. I am going to try to do one every couple days or so.

I was thinking I could send them to one of you and you can either share it for the others or host it somewhere (I don't have any personal webspace).

The ones I know of are fritz, senator and peregrine who were interested.

[Axxon]

I'd be interested in listening to these. I don't have a spot to host anything but I just wanted you to know that there's at least a bit more interest in this project. Might convince someone to host these for a while. :)

[clintl]

I would be interested in hearing them, too, but don't have a place to host them.

[Senator]

I guess I could do it. I have a site that has 500Mb available. It will probably get eaten up pretty quick though.

HFP - I will send you the FTP passwords later tonight.

[HornedFrog Purple]

Hey thanks Sen!

I got both records done, 23 tracks in all but because its in mono it's only 63.2 megs. I managed to get most of the hiss out. They sound better than the first attempt I tried a while back.

I guess what we can do is I'll FTP to Senator, he can leave it up for a couple days with the info and then I'll do another one. I can do one at a time, save him space and I have time to remove as much of the record hiss as I can. Sound good?

[Draft Dodger]

I'd love to hear these when they get up.

[Peregrine]

Wow, sounds like a good plan! I'd definitely be in on this.

[Senator]

At only 63 megs, we have a little room, so maybe we can get 3-4 on there before rotating them out.

[Peregrine]

Thought this article might be of interest to us blues fans. Wild!

http://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/2004/04/19.html

[Fritz]

That is very cool.

Thought this article might be of interest to us blues fans. Wild!

http://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/2004/04/19.html

[albionmoonlight]

I'd love to be in on this.

[Senator]

I have given HFP the rights to the website for uploading. We will try to let everybody who wants them to get them, but I will have to watch the amount of transfer going on to avoid being hit with charges.

I wish Burns would do a documentary on the Blues like he did for Jazz. Also that he did one for football like he did for basesball. oh, well.

[Anthony]

how do you put records onto your PC? i got some casset tapes i want on my pc.

[Senator]

Just heard HFP Henry Thomas 1927-29 Run, Mollie, Run mp3.

Damn, that is good stuff. Thanks HFP!

[HornedFrog Purple]

Thanks Sen, I could listen to him all day.

Henry Thomas isn't very well known, here is what I could dig up:

THOMAS, HENRY (1874-1950s?). Henry (Ragtime Texas) Thomas, an early exponent of country blues, was born in Big Sandy, Texas, in 1874, one of nine children of former slaves who sharecropped on a cotton plantation in the northeastern part of the state. Thomas learned to hate cotton farming at an early age and left home as soon as he could, around 1890, to pursue a career as an itinerant "songster." Derrick Stewart-Barker has commented that for his money Thomas was the best songster "that ever recorded." Thomas first taught himself to play the quills, a folk instrument made from cane reeds that sound similar to the quena used by musicians in Peru and Bolivia; later, he picked up the guitar. On the twenty-three recordings made by Thomas from 1927 to 1929, he sings a variety of songs and accompanies himself on guitar and at times on the quills. His accompaniment work on guitar has been ranked "with the finest dance blues ever recorded" and, according to Stephen Calt, "its intricate simultaneous treble picking and drone bass would have posed a challenge to any blues guitarist of any era." The range of Thomas's work makes him something of a transitional figure between the early minstrel songs, spirituals, square dance tunes, hillbilly reels, waltzes, and rags and the rise of blues and jazz. Basically his repertoire, which mostly consists of dance pieces, was out-of-date by the turn of the century when the blues began to grow in popularity. Thomas's nickname, "Ragtime Texas," is thought to have come to him because he played in fast tempos, which were synonymous for some musicians with ragtime. Five of Thomas's pieces have been characterized as "rag ditties," among them "Red River Blues," and such rag songs have been considered the immediate forerunners and early rivals of blues.

Out of Thomas's twenty-three recorded pieces, only four are "bona fide blues," so that he has been looked upon as more of a predecessor rather than a blues singer as such. One commentator has claimed that Thomas's blues are original with him and that other musicians seem not to have performed his pieces. However, Thomas's "Bull Doze Blues" ends with the four-bar "Take Me Back," a Texas standard of the World War Iqv era, which Blind Lemon Jeffersonqv had recorded around August 1926 as "Beggin' Back." It would seem, then, that Thomas's blues represent many traditional themes and vocal phrases. For example, Thomas's "Texas Easy Street Blues" contains the verse made famous by Jimmy Rushing and Joe Williams in their 1930s to 1950s versions of the Basie-Rushing tune, "Goin' to Chicago": "When you see me comin', baby, raise your window high." Another well-known phrase found in this same Thomas piece is "blue as I can be." But perhaps most indicative of Thomas's transitional position between the early black music and jazz is his "Cottonfield Blues," which contains several standard blues themes: field labor, the desire for escape, and the role of the railroad in providing a freer lifestyle.

Thomas escaped from a life of farm work by taking to the rails to make a living by singing along the Texas and Pacific and Katy lines that ran from Fort Worth-Dallas to Texarkana. In "Railroadin' Some," Thomas supplies his itinerary, which includes Texas towns like Rockwall, Greenville (with its infamous sign, "Land of the Blackest Earth and the Whitest People"), Denison, Grand Saline, Silver Lake, Mineola, Tyler (where Thomas was last active in the 1950s), Longview, Jefferson, Marshall, Little Sandy, and his birthplace of Big Sandy. Texas communities are not the only ones cited in this song, for Thomas traveled into the Indian Territory, as he still called it, to Muskogee, over to Missouri and Scott Joplin'sqv stomping grounds of Sedalia, and on up to Kansas City, then into Illinois: Springfield, Bloomington, Joliet, and Chicago, where he attended the 1893 Columbian Exposition, as did Joplin. In speaking of this piece, William Barlow calls it the most "vivid and intense recollection of railroading" in all the early blues recorded in the 1920s. The cadences in this early rural blues "depict the restless lifestyle of the vagabonds who rode the rails and their boundless enthusiasm for the mobility it gave them."

By and large Thomas's recordings represent a wide variety of sources for his Texas brand of country music, dating back to a time before the blues became popular and before in essence they subsumed many other popular song forms. This perhaps accounts for the fact that three of Thomas's songs-"Fishing Blues," "Woodhouse Blues," and "Red River Blues"-are not in reality based on the blues but may have taken the name as a way of capitalizing on the form's growing popularity. According to Stephen Calt, both "Fishing Blues" and "Woodhouse Blues" are of vaudeville origins, while "Red River Blues" has been related melodically to "Comin' Round the Mountain," published in sheet music form in 1889 but deriving from an earlier spiritual. The importance of Thomas's recordings as something of a compendium of the popular song forms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-from spiritual to "coon song," from "rag" song to blues-is enhanced by the similar range of instrumental techniques found in his work with guitar and quills. In a sense, then, Henry Thomas represents a vital link between the roots of black music in Africa, nineteenth and twentieth-century American folksong (including spiritual, hillbilly, "rag," and "coon"), and the coming of the blues-all of these contributing in turn to the formation of jazz in its various forms, which are reflected in the varied approaches to rhythmic, tonal, and thematic expression practiced by "Ragtime Texas" decades before he made his series of recordings from 1927 to 1929.

[Senator]

ok HFP, I changed the folder to HT for easier access. Let whomever you want in there to get it.

[HornedFrog Purple]

ok check your PM, I had a question

[Peregrine]

Will HFP let us know when the website is up for the Thomas stuff? Sounds good.

[Peregrine]

I wish Burns would do a documentary on the Blues like he did for Jazz.

That PBS Blues series a few months ago was pretty good. They had five documentaries by different people, each in a different style, but all about the blues. Some of them were very well done, particularly the Wim Wenders one.

[Senator]

I guess I will need to make an html page for the mp3's. Right now they are in a folder on the site, but I thought that if you opened the folder you would get a directory of the files within. Guess not.

the locaction is http://www.braindeposit.com/ht

[cthomer5000]

I could also host 1 or 2 albums at a time.

If you wanted to set up some rotation where someone (Senator) hosts a few of the most recent ones, and I host a few older ones... you could keep at least 5 albums up at a time, and keep any given available for a decent length of time.

[cthomer5000]

I guess I will need to make an html page for the mp3's. Right now they are in a folder on the site, but I thought that if you opened the folder you would get a directory of the files within. Guess not.

the locaction is http://www.braindeposit.com/ht (http://www.braindeposit.com/ht)
Tell me if you come up with any easy way to create a file that just lists the contents of a folder.


Also, if you won't have the html file up soon... we'd appreciate some direct links to the files. :) (Or just the names/sequence of names).

[Draft Dodger]

I guess I will need to make an html page for the mp3's. Right now they are in a folder on the site, but I thought that if you opened the folder you would get a directory of the files within. Guess not.

the locaction is http://www.braindeposit.com/ht

love the error message:
The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated.
:D

[cthomer5000]

love the error message:
The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated.
:D
yeah, i think that's 1and1's generic message. I'm thinking there is probably a way to make your directories viewable.... but i'm clueless as to how to do it.

If anyone has any answers on that, let us know. :(

[Senator]

And I am at work, so I am not sure what each mp3 is named, otherwise I would list 23 links.

[HornedFrog Purple]

Sorry everybody, we had a call and I was on site there for 7 hours. I just tested and these should work:

www.braindeposit.com/ht/01-Fishing Blues.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/02-Old Country Stomp.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/03-Charmin' Betsy.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/04-Lovin' Babe.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/05-Railroadin' Some.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/06-Don't Leave Me Here.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/07-The Little Red Caboose.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/08-BobMckinney.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/09-Honey, Won't You Allow Me One More Chance.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/10-Run, Mollie, Run.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/11-Shanty Blues.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/12-Woodhouse Blues.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/13-John Henry.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/14-Cottonfield Blues.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/15-Arkansas.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/16-The Fox and The Hounds.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/17-Red River Blues.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/18-Jonah In The Wilderness.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/19-When The Train Comes Along.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/20-Bull Doze Blues.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/21-Don't Ease Me In.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/22-Texas Easy Street.mp3

www.braindeposit.com/ht/23-Texas Worried Blues.mp3

Let me know how they sound good or bad!

[albionmoonlight]

Kick Ass. They sound great.

[cthomer5000]

Sounds pretty damn good for coming off a 1927 78 record.

[HornedFrog Purple]

Actually they were 2 different records, but some of the songs were the same on both of them so I just combined them. I forgot to add the times up but I'm betting they should all fit on one CD.

[Draft Dodger]

really cool.

so, is that instrument I'm hearing a recorder? flute?

[cthomer5000]

really cool.

so, is that instrument I'm hearing a recorder? flute?
I was also curious. Either that or a very poorly recorded harmonica.

[HornedFrog Purple]

Yeah it's a quills which is a southern name for a pan flute. :) It looks like little bamboo tubes tied together. My grandfather had a set of them. I think they play like the harp, you just blow into different tubes for different notes.

[clintl]

I just downloaded them and listened to a couple of songs. They sound great. Thanks!

[Peregrine]

Thanks HFP! This stuff is wonderful. I love hearing the quills, a lot of the really oldschool blues guys played those but you don't hear a lot of recordings with them. I really like Fishin' Blues, didn't Taj Mahal cover that song, I know I've heard it done by another artist.

[Fritz]

who else do I have to PM to get the darn addr? Lemme in dammit!

[HornedFrog Purple]

sorry fritzy, I misunderstood your PM, I sent one back at you.

[Fritz]

my fault. I had PMed you and Senator and had not gotten a reply and did not check back in thread. when I posted the above I did not bother to read the new posts.

[Fritz]

compare

www.braindeposit.com/ht/13-John Henry.mp3
http://www.buffworks.com/sounds/03 John Henry.mp3

[HornedFrog Purple]

compare

www.braindeposit.com/ht/13-John Henry.mp3
http://www.buffworks.com/sounds/03 John Henry.mp3

Yeah! I love the harp!

[JAG]

Thanks HFP, good stuff.