News Roundup

A Mississippi Public Broadcasting story, the “Kids Write the Blues”, by Ron Brown recently won an Edward R. Murrow Award. The story features fourth graders from the Matty Akin Elementary School in Greenville reading their songs celebrating the Delta blues and heritage. “This is a positive story that hopefully inspired those who heard it,” explains Brown. “I know these kids touched my heart. If I passed that feeling along, then I did a good job. I am honored by the recognition of a national Murrow award.” Brown’s art reports are funded by the Wallace Foundation through the Mississippi Arts Commission.

Morgan Freeman and Bill Luckett will be adding a Ground Zero Blues Club in 2009 in Philadelphia, Mississippi at the Pearl River Resort. Currently, in addition to the original in Clarksdale, Freeman and Luckett also have a GZBC in Memphis.

Clarksdale's Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art is one of the top 17 cool record stores in the country according to Paste Magazine.

In this inteview with rapper David Banner, the Mississippi native reflects on the future of hip-hop in the South.

The Bolivar Commercial is reporting on renovations at Dockery Farms:

The Dockery Farms Foundation is getting ready to begin phase one of an estimated $800,000 refurbishing and revitalization project. The buildings to be preserved include the Seed House, Cotton Gin, Cotton Storage Shed, Hay Barn and Fertilizer Shed as well as the Old Service Station. The foundation would also like to rebuild the Commissary, which was part of the original Dockery Farms property but was destroyed by a fire years ago. “This will provide a place for other universities and any groups that want to come to Dockery for a place to study the history of the Delta and the Blues,” he said. Dockery Farms was established by Will Dockery in 1895 to produce cotton. African Americans who came to Dockery to cultivate cotton created a culture that inspired the music known as the Blues. It was home to a number of Blues pioneers. “Dockery is considered the birthplace of the Blues,” said Lester. “Charley Patton, Pops Stables, Willie Brown and others are all folks who played the Blues that has influenced popular music. It all started right here.” It was at Dockery that these musicians lived and learned from one another. In turn they left Dockery and traveled north to record. Their songs influenced the development of popular music all over the world.

Read the full story here: Dockery Farms shakes blues with restoration

A couple of Mose's

Memphis Music & Heritage Festival pays tribute to Mose Vinson:

Born in north Mississippi in 1917, the boogie-woogie pianist served as janitor and fill-in session musician at Sun in the '50s; when Peiser met him, he was playing at Peanut's, a seedy Midtown bar.

"Mose goes back to dirt. He looked like he was 150 years old when he was about 50," recalls local producer and performer Jim Dickinson, who, along with Vinson, Rufus Thomas, Eddie Bond, and the Spirit of Memphis gospel quartet, was a headliner at the Center for Southern Folklore's first Memphis Music & Heritage Festival, held in 1982. (The festival became an annual event in 1988.)

In 1997, Dickinson, Peiser, and Knox Phillips co-produced Piano Man, Vinson's first solo album.

"For me, it wasn't as much the historical aspect as it was getting the musical qualities of his voice on tape," Dickinson says. "I cut Mose the same way I did the Replacements. I just tried to make him comfortable and take him back to a certain place in time. When Mose asked, 'You ain't got no pain pills?' that just made it for me."

Dickinson, Bond, and the Spirit of Memphis will reprise their '82 appearances with new sets at this year's Memphis Music & Heritage Festival, which Peiser views as a tribute to Vinson, who died in 2002. (Full Story)


Mose Allison: ‘I’m dealin’ with the essentials’

Jazz sage Mose Allison, 80, could be forgiven for kicking back on his front porch and singing to himself instead of hustling off to 120-plus dates a year.Problem is, he’s not yet tired of hipping generation after generation to his vinegary piano style and spot-on social commentary. Allison says his classic attack-of-the-fascists dirge, “Monsters of the Id,” has never been better received.

Jazz sage Mose Allison will perform Friday and Saturday at Lansing's JazzFest. Photo courtesy of Carol Fridman.“People come up and ask me, ‘Did you just write that song?’ and I did it 40 years ago,” Allison says.

“The same things always keep happening,” he declares. “There’s always a war, there’s always hypocrisy and political maneuvering, corruption and all that stuff. I’m dealin’ with the essentials.”

“Monsters of the Id” paints a blackly funny picture of society’s self-styled leaders. “Creatures from the swamp are writing their own Mein Kampf,” he sings in his famous seen-it-all drawl. As usual, he pretends to calm while stirring the muck in your mind. “No need to make a fuss,” he reassures. “No need to cause a scene. They know what’s best for us. They’re fighting fire with gasoline.”

As the ship of civilization sinks deeper and deeper, audiences love nothing more than to pull up a deck chair near Allison and enjoy the nosedive.

“I still enjoy playing,” he says. “The traveling is getting to be kind of a drag. That will probably have more to do with me quitting than anything else. Once I get to the piano, I’m OK.”

Allison’s melting-pot keyboard style mixes several jazz variants, from Gerwhwin-esque polish to Thelonious Monk prickliness, with traces of hard blues and deep country from his Mississippi youth. His terse tunes skitter like a knife on a cutting board, while his lyrics make him one of the great American gentleman malcontents on the order of Mark Twain and Bob Dylan....

Growing up in rural Tippo, Miss., at the heart of the Mississippi River delta, Allison was steeped in blues, jazz, big-band swing and country music. He also took classical music lessons and was drawn to the authority and flexibility of the piano. “I grew up listening to Nat King Cole and Erroll Garner, and then I started listening to Monk and John Lewis and Bud Powell,” he says. (Full Story)

Pinetop Perkins DVD

Josh Perkins reviews the new music DVD documentary on Belzoni native and blues legend Pinetop Perkins.

Perkins writes: Joe Willie “Pinetop” Perkins is a national treasure. Forget Mount Rushmore and to hell with the Grand Canyon – old rocks and dead men are no match for a timeless spring of eternal blues....

He was born in Belzoni, Mississippi [in 1913] on the Honey Island plantation. Perkins has taken to saying he was “born in the honey,” a turn of phrase that now serves as the title of a 60-minute documentary on his incredible life.

He started playing music at an early age, learning both guitar and piano as a youngster before leaving home around age 16....He moved to Clarksdale in 1940, not long after the moonshine operation he helped run got broken up. His fellow entrepreneurs were apprehended by the law. He escaped and decided it was time for a change of scenery....Perkins knocked around Memphis, St. Louis, and Cairo, Illinois throughout the '50s. While in Memphis, he taught Ike Turner to play piano. He also recorded on a session with Earl Hooker for Sun Records. While there, he recorded “Pinetop's Boogie Woogie,” which was originally recorded by Clarence “Pinetop” Smith. The song meant so much to Perkins that he donned the nickname himself, becoming even more famous than its originator....

Born in the Honey assembles a wonderful cast of blues legends to both pay tribute to Perkins as well as swap stories about time spent with him. Bobby Rush has a great story about Pinetop the prankster. Ike Turner, Bob Margolin, Willie “Big Eyes” Smith, Ann Rabson, Paul Oscher, Dr. John, Lonnie Brooks, Hubert Sumlin, Taj Majal, Kim Wilson, Marcia Ball, Koko Tayler, and Bernard Allison are all interviewed during the documentary as is Pinetop himself....

Pinetop Perkins is a blues icon, and Born in the Honey does a fine job of telling his story....Also included in the package is a 10-song CD, Pinetop Perkins on the 88s. The first nine tracks are taken from a live performance.

(Read the full article here.)