Something/Someone Old

I spent the day helping my mom get some Christmas spirit into her house. Then we went to a blues event. So I'm writing this rather late at night--after my mom and I went to see this fella:

This is what Wikipedia had to say about him:

Book Binder has been described as a guitar-picking hillbilly bluesman. He has released 12 albums and has performed at most major blues and folk festivals in the U.S. and Europe, including Merlefest. Notables that have shared the stage with Book Binder include Bonnie Raitt, B.B. King, John Jackson, Sonny Terry, Doc Watson, Ray Charles, and Brownie McGhee. He has appeared regularly on Nashville Now. He is listed in Blues Who's Who, by the music historian Sheldon Harris.

He is my Someone Old. Some of the music he plays is considerably older than he is, as is the way with blues fellas, some of it dating back to the 1900s. He worked with (and learned from) the Reverend Gary Davis, and Dave van Ronk.

I liked him a lot. It brought back a lot of memories to my mom about her time in Boston a couple years before I was born. Apparently Dave van Ronk, Jim Kweskin, the Muldaurs and just about everybody else were thick on the ground in Boston. Free music from these brilliant lights was available on practically every street corner.

Sounds like it was a good time.

Something New

It's a little ironic to call this something new, because it's all about refurbishing things that are old--but this is the new reality tv show Kate and I have been watching.

Just as a side note--reality tv is not nearly so bad when you get it from Britain, or even Australia. We like cooking, architecture, gardening, and interior design, in that order--but the American reality tv shows are, well, we couldn't get through the opening credits.

So here it is--The Repair Shop.

Expert craftsmen pool their talents and resources to restore heirlooms and treasured antiques such as music boxes, vases and clocks to prove that anything can be restored to their former glory.

It's probably become obvious that I tend to prefer the old to the new, particularly when it comes to material made objects. I don't see any reason to pretend that the new is better made or made of better materials when that is almost never true.

Something Borrowed

A lot of blues music, jug band music, and folk music in general are borrowed, in that people remake songs written by others over and over again throughout the years and even the generations.

"Richland Woman Blues" is a song I met through the album Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band, an album which has stayed with me and grown with me for decades. Love it to pieces. Here's the Jug Band version of the song:

But the song was actually written by Mississippi John Hurt. I can't find the date for it, but Hurt himself was born (we think) in 1893 and died in 1966, after being rediscovered and introduced to a worldwide audience in 1964 by Dick Spottswood, a musicologist, and Tom Hoskins. They convinced Hurt to move to D.C. and record his songs. These events are credited with accelerating and in some ways making possible the great folk blues revival of the 60s.

Here is Mississippi John Hurt performing "Richland Woman Blues:"

Something Blue

Seems like almost everything in this post has been blue!

Has anybody else read the book Girl in Hyacinth Blue? It follows the Vermeer painting through many generations and eight stories. Well worth reading.

I'd show you an image of the book, but I can no longer embed images using the file uploader. I noticed some time ago that many images would not embed and instead would irritatingly take me to another page which displayed the image. This has increased over time until now I can hardly find an image which will embed correctly.