Last month I heard from my old friend Bob Bovee that our mutual friend Glenn Ohrlin, maybe the greatest cowboy singer that ever lived, had passed on at age 88 in Mountain View, Arkansas, where he had made his home for many years. It was only about 10 days before his passing that he’d been […]
Russ Hamm and I are starting in on the work of transferring the material in my library to digital format. As I told you previously, the Grammy Foundation gave us a grant to do just that. Mostly the material we will transfer will come from the series of festivals we did from 1967 thru 1987 […]
Someone suggested to me that I get one of those t-shirts that reads “I may be old but I got to see all the good bands.” Well that may be so, but the problem with that shirt is the electric V shaped Electric Guitar on it. It should be a Mosrite double-necked electric with the […]
Black history on record started with orchestra and gospel music by groups like the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Jim Europe Military Band and a few vaudevillians like Bert Williams, Robert Woolsey, and Laughing Jim, but black jazz started with Mamie Smith’s Okeh 4169 “Crazy Blues/It’s Right Here for You.” Both songs were described on […]
Sam Chatmon was one of the most remarkable individuals I have ever known. During the years he spent in San Diego (1966-1982, where he became an important part of the blues scene), I had a many chances to sit and talk with him. This excerpt is taken from one of those conversations. I was born […]
I’d only been in San Diego about a week. It was September and it was hot. My uncle Tony called them Santa Ana winds. They sure were blowin’, but we all climbed into that big old stake truck, held on to the slats, and headed off from Chula Vista out to the country east of […]
It was along about 1969 that I first became more than aware of U Utah Phillips. Now, I had heard of Bruce Phillips some time before that from an old Prestige International long-play record that I had picked up from time to time, which Rosalie Sorrels had written the notes for, and I’d seen that […]
There used to be a club on First and C Streets in downtown San Diego called the College Inn that was a long-time home to country music, country boogie and swing, and rock-a-billy. The audience was mostly navy and a few of us who came for the music. I remember seeing Merle Travis, Roy Hogsed, […]
The first phonograph records that I was even consciously aware of when I was about four or five years old were by Roy Acuff and the Smokey Mountain Boys on those old lavender Okey 78s and, I think, one on Melotone that my Mom picked up at Seattle’s Pike Place Market. I remember tunes like […]
