Post 612: CRAIG FLORY'S 'MINOR FRET'

What a wonderful and complex composition Craig Flory’s ‘Minor Fret’ is. Through-composed, it is possibly the most striking and challenging piece Tuba Skinny ever set itself to learn by heart. 

Beginning (in recent performances) with a single beat played on the washboard, the rest of the first bar has the band holding an E flat minor chord, followed by four (in earlier performances two) more bars of Introduction, establishing the key by firmly laying down that chord on every beat.

This is followed by a 12-bar blues theme in E flat minor, led by Craig on clarinet, with Shaye playing a pretty counter-melody in bars 2 and 4. Then Shaye herself leads the way through the 12-bar blues theme, this time with Barnabus playing the counter-melody.

Now something extraordinary happens: the rug is pulled from under us! There is a startling switch up by just one semi-tone to the key of E minor! The acid E minor chord is hammered out over eight bars, during which Craig plays that counter-melody again – but in the new key. The eight bars end with a heavily-struck B flat 7th chord, which leads us cleverly back into the principal key of E flat minor.

We now have the 12-bar blues in E flat minor again, but usually with the trombone (Barnabus) taking the lead in the final eight of those bars.

Now those final eight themselves become the pattern for a new theme: we have this little theme, played three (in some performances four) times and usually led respectively by the cornet, the clarinet, the tuba and (against offbeats) the guitar. This eight-bar theme uses the chord structure of the final eight bars of the 12-bar blues in E flat minor.

The last of these mini-solos ends on a crashing B 7th chord, taking us for a second time into that wailing Interlude of eight bars in E minor, again including the counter-melody and ending on a sustained B flat 7th chord, which of course takes us neatly back into the key of E flat minor for another run-through of the twelve-bar blues theme and a lingering drop on the final E flat minor chord. Wow!

You can hear Tuba Skinny play this piece in its mature form, after some months of gestation and tweaking, in this video filmed by my good friend James Sterling:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNDWAJvhN_4

Post 575: MEMPHIS MINNIE, TUBA SKINNY AND 'FRISCO BOUND' - A TEN-BAR TUNE

Memphis Minnie was quite somebody. She could play the guitar and sing well. But she was also a composer of some fine early jazz tunes.

Her real name was Lizzie Douglas and she was born in the New Orleans suburb of Algiers in 1897. Her family later lived in Tennessee. As a child, she mastered the banjo and guitar. She took to busking in the Beale Street, Memphis, area when she was only a teenager, and she also toured with a circus. It was a hard life. She became a tough, street-wise young woman; and this toughness was reflected later in her singing and playing.

She married three times. Her second husband, Joe McCoy, was a fellow busker. They were talent-spotted and went on to make records for both Columbia and Vocalion.

It was at that time (when she was already more than 30 years old) that the publicists decided to call her 'Memphis Minnie' and the name stuck. (Similarly, her husband was given the name 'Kansas Joe'.) Between 1929 and 1934, they recorded about 30 songs, some of them more than once. After they divorced, she recorded many more, sometimes with Kansas Joe's brother and later with her third husband - Ernest Lawler ('Little Son Joe'). At this time she was mainly based in Chicago.

Minnie recorded more than 130 songs in total, several of them composed by herself. Among songs Minnie recorded that have influenced and been revived by the young New Orleans musicians of the 21st Century are: Bumble Bee, Frisco Town, I'm Goin' Back Home, Me and My Chauffeur, Ice Man, Tricks Ain't Walkin' No More, What's The Matter With the Mill?, New Dirty Dozen, and When the Levee Breaks. 

Minnie is known to have been the composer of the following songs that she recorded: Black Cat Blues, You Caught Me Wrong Again, Down in the Alley, Good Biscuits, Good Morning, Has Anyone Seen My Man?, Hoodoo Lady, I Hate To See The Sun Go Down, I'm a Bad Luck Woman, I've Been Treated Wrong, Ice Man, If You See My Rooster, Keep On Eating, Ma Rainey, Man You Won't Give Me No Money, My Baby Don't Want Me No More, My Butcher Man, My Strange Man, Nothin' In Rambling. Some of the other songs for which she became well known (such as Bumble Bee and  Me and My Chauffeur) were written by McCoy or Lawler.

You can hear Minnie and her third husband (the composer) performing Me and My Chauffeur
by clicking here.
And you can watch one of today's young traditional jazz bands performing the song by clicking here.

Memphis Minnie seems to have been the composer of Frisco Town (a ten-bar blues) in 1929.  She recorded it with her husband Kansas Joe the same year. Its title rapidly changed to Frisco Bound. (This a quite different song from the Frisco Bound composed by Sam Powers in 1915.)

Still in 1929, a recording of Frisco Bound was made by James Wiggins and this increased its popularity.

This song also has recently been revived in its ten-bar form by Tuba Skinny:

Click Here.

How does it come to be a ten-bar blues? Well, if you look closely at its structure, you will see it is really a 12-bar blues, but with the first two bars omitted.

Two choruses here:

In another video of Tuba Skinny, the young musicians may be seen performing one of the 12-bar blues written by Minnie's second husband (Joe McCoy). The singer is Erika Lewis. Enjoy especially at 2 mins 20 seconds (and again later) the descending triplets played by the clarinettist (Craig Flory) in his 'solo' chorus. The song is called If You Take Me Back. You can watch it by clicking here.

By the way, my book about Tuba Skinny is now available. If you may be interested, go to the Amazon Website, click on 'Books', and type in 'Tuba Skinny and Shaye Cohn'.

Post 327: 'MEMPHIS SHAKE' - A GREAT JAZZ TUNE

There is a terrific video of Tuba Skinny performing Memphis Shake. It is expertly filmed; and the tune - from 1926 - is brilliantly played. Unfortunately the start of the tune was not caught; but I think it's a video you will enjoy.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW.

Todd on Tuba

There were eight musicians on this occasion

Post 71: PEG LEG HOWELL

I have been led to Peg Leg Howell by the YouTube videos of young musicians in the streets of New Orleans. I had not previously heard of him. Many of today's performers have been inspired by Early American Black Country Music and they have revived the 90-year-old tunes of such guitarists as Peg Leg Howell, Frank Stokes and Blind Blake.

PEG LEG HOWELL (1888 - 1966) lived in Georgia and really did have a peg leg (a leg having been amputated after he was shot in a fight). His real name was Joshua Barnes Howell. He was a farm labourer and a self-taught busking guitarist. 

Howell's Trio
He is on the right; Williams on the left; Anthony centre.

As required by the mythology that often surrounds such characters, he served time in prison for alcohol offences. But in the 1920s he also made over twenty influential recordings of songs with Columbia Records. The two I must mention as having been particularly taken up again recently in New Orleans are: Banjo Blues and Too Tight Blues. Too Tight is an unusual blues in having several 8-bar three-chord vocals, interspersed with standard 12-bar instrumental improvisations. To see a jazz band playing it recently (though eschewing the 12-bar option),
CLICK HERE.
For a great foot-tapping version of Banjo Blues by fifteen of today's New Orleans buskers,
CLICK HERE.
And to hear the original 1928 recording by Peg Leg himself (with Eddie Anthony on violin),
CLICK HERE.

You can find a full Peg Leg Howell discography   BY CLICKING ON HERE.