Casey Jones was an American railwayman who, in 1900, while racing his train to make up for lost time, saw another stationary train on the track ahead. He ordered his fireman, Sim Webb, to jump off the moving train but refused to do so himself. Instead he died while bravely remaining on board trying to stop his train and blowing its warning whistle as it ploughed into the rear of the one ahead.

Furry Lewis was an itinerant Medicine Show musician who, in 1917, while jumping onto a moving train in order to avoid paying the fare, got his foot caught in a coupling and lost a leg. He continued making his living as a travelling guitarist and singer until 1923 when he finally decided that touring was just too difficult and settled down in Memphis as a street sweeper.   

more

Four reasons why this is the coolest record of all time:

1. It features a guitar solo of precisely 3 notes. And they’re not even 3 different ones. So sparse is it that it makes that other minimalist guitar solo – the  1-note solo in the Buzzcocks’ ‘Boredom’ - sound indulgent.

2. Slim Harpo was named Slim Harpo because -  bet you can’t guess – he was a harmonica vituoso. But I suppose if you’re that good you don’t need to prove it all the time. So on ’King Bee’ - Slim’s first release and the song he would become most remembered for – he just adds a few blows near the end, almost as an after-thought. A bit like Jimi Hendrix not putting much guitar on his first single.

more

So we’ve reached ABON 0015 and nothing yet from the ’60′s. How’s that happened?

Think ’60′s and you think Flower Power, Summer of Love, Spector Wall of Sound, Beatles, Stones, Surf Bands, Soul and Funk and England having a World Class National Football Team. True but that only captures a fraction of the debris from the musical Big Bang that went off sometime in the early ’60′s.

Meet the American Garage Band of the mid ’60′s.

By 1966 America had been subjected to the British explosion of rock bands lead by The Beatles, The Stones,The Yardbirds, The Who, The Kinks et al for a couple of years. One of the consequences had been – for a significant proportion of American youth – an almost compulsive urge to be in a BAND. Any BAND.

The other had been a re-examination by these same proto-bandsters of the American Blues and Rock’n'Roll heritage that the Brits had plundered (and largely watered down) over the previous few years and the American mainstream had forgotten about.

The result was an explosion of Garage Bands. Bands who just seemed to come out of the woodwork, with an obsession for electric guitars and distortion, a knack of creating very modern but often fairly primitive takes on Rock’n'Roll or Blues and usually just one or sometimes two good ideas that turned into singles.

more