When Willie Mae Thornton left home to tour the Southern States of the USA as a singer in the Hot Harlem Revue in 1941 she was just 14. Just like Big Joe Turner, who’d started his career only a couple of years before (ABON 0138), she could shout the Blues louder than most of her rivals, who were twice her age. And also like Big Joe Turner, even as a teenager, she had the physique to gain access to the bars, clubs and theatres of the South years before she should legally have been allowed to. 

By the beginning of the 1950s, although she was still only 24, she had already been on the stage for 10 years and plain Willie Mae had blossomed into Big Mama Thornton. At 20 stone and with a voice that had become even more ferocious over the years, she was an imposing and slightly intimidating figure. 

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Welcome to the Worlds of Mashup and of, despite what his stage name might suggest, the shy and retiring Fuckintosh.

When we left sampling in ABON 0019 with The Field, we were listening to a sample from a single song manipulated to create a new track. In contrast Mashup takes two songs by different artists and creates an original piece by mashing the two together. Most Mashup seems to involve cutting the vocals from one song and laying them onto another. The results are often comic because of the ‘inappropriateness’ of the words in their new context. Fuckintosh, although firmly a Mashup artist produces works of beauty that are as far from ‘Novelty’ tracks as you could imagine. Despite what his stage name might suggest.

In the hands of Fuckintosh, time and time again (he’s produced eight stunning albums of this stuff to my knowledge so far) Mashup becomes a creative process that produces technically brilliant and completely original pieces of music that occupy a space which the source or original recordings rarely even suggest might exist. To my ears his work is far more stimulating and original than most of the music created by his peers writing ‘original’ songs from scratch. So while a lot of Mashup can be very crudely put together and a little nihilistic, Fuckintosh’s is highly creative and optimistic. Despite what his stage name might suggest.

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Professor Longhair was a pianist, singer and songwriter born in 1918. After a series of street ‘jobs’ in New Orleans, such as tap dancing for tips and playing cards for money he finally got a break and began to release singles in 1949.
These singles were often big hits with a black American audience but he never managed to get that cross-over hit that might have made him as famous and as wealthy as Fats Domino.
He continued to record intermittently during the ’50′s but his style didn’t really evolve from his initial sessions in 1949. Indeed he had a habit of re-recording many of these originals over and over again. But by the mid ’60′s and the change in musical tastes heralded by the Brit Invasion, Professor Longhair had given up any hope of making any money from his music and, disillusioned, he ended up where he’d started – doing bad jobs such as sweeping up in a record shop.
This slightly sad biography doesn’t get close to indicating what an effect his handful of recordings from ’49 and the very early ’50′s had on the history of music. Without ever becoming a household name he was possibly the most important single inspiration for Rock’n'Roll.

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