Charles Farley
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Doo-Wop!

6/24/2021

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There's not much good I can say about the COVID-19 Pandemic, except for one:  I had a chance to catch up on a lot of streaming videos that I had missed, but wanted to see.
And one of the best was a fine music documentary entitled "Streetlight Harmonies" about Doo-Wop music.  Directed and co-written by Brent Wilson, the film recounts the history of the genre from its origins in African-American gospel music to "the streets to the subways to the hallways" all over urban American, as Jerome Anthony Gourdine, the lead singer of Little Anthony and the Imperials ("Tears on my Pillow"), says in one of 45 interviews captured in the 83-minute film.
But it's not just talking heads, as the interviews are interspersed with rare archival footage of concerts, civil rights protests, and other informative and entertaining commentary.
Altogether, "Streetlight Harmonies" presents a joyful noise of the soundtrack of much of my generation's lives and loves.
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My first Doo-Wop memory was of sitting in the dark Trail Theater in little Olathe, Kansas, and watching transfixed over and over, at least three times, the 1956 movie "Rock, Rock, Rock, with the Moonglows ("Ten Commandments of Love"), the Flamingos ("I Only Have Eyes for You"), and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers ("Why Do Fools Fall in Love?"), not to mention LaVern Baker and Chuck Berry.
Fast forward to 1965 when the Drifters ("This Magic Moment") played an all-night Kansas University frat party in Lawrence.
Later, around 2015, my daughter Emily and I caught Martha and the Vadnellas ("Dancing in the Streets") at B.B. Kings in New York City.

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Then, one night, in 2019, after a canoe trip in southern Mississippi, my son Sam and I went to a Charmaine Neville show at the Snug Harbor Jazz Club in New Orleans and were surprised when Charmaine invited one of New Orleans' Dixie Cups to join her and the mainly older tourist audience in a choir-like chorus of "Chapel of Love"..."Going to the Chapel and we're going to get married..."
So it goes:  Fantastic music, fantastic film!  Be prepared to sing along.

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Father's Day

6/16/2021

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Pre-Father's Day Book Signing
This Saturday, June 19, 2021
11AM--2PM
Harrison Brothers Hardware
Southside Square
Huntsville, Alabama

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Blues Music Awards

6/9/2021

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The Blues Foundation held its 42nd annual Blues Music Awards program this past Sunday, virtually as it was done last year, because of the continuing pandemic.
It seems as though it was another case of "round up the usual suspects," as veteran blues performers, garnered most of the hardware:  Shemekia Copeland, Elvin Bishop, Charlie Musselwhite, Walter Trout, Bobby Rush, Mike Zito, Robert Cray, Keb' Mo', Bettye LaVette, Curtis Salgado, Rory Block, Ruthie Foster, and others.  Not that these well-weathered stars don't deserve the accolades, because they surely do. 
But it's also good to hear the new, young artists who carry on the blues tradition, while bringing a pleasing freshness and originality to the genre.  Folks like Clarksdale phenom Christone "Kingfish" Ingram, who won awards both last year and this year and Emerging Artist Album of the Year ("Harlem") vocalist and guitarist King Solomon Hicks, both authentic talents who have great presence and bright futures as blues stars and influencers for many years to come.  Welcome! 

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The Last Soul Company

6/3/2021

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Back in 2008, when I was beginning to research Soul of the Man:  Bobby "Blue" Bland, I spent an intriguing and insightful day with Wolf Stephenson and Tommy Couch Sr. at Malaco Records in Jackson, Mississippi, where they, along with Mitchell Malouf, three Old Miss frat brothers, had founded the company in 1967. 
Wolf was particularly generous with his time and reminiscences of the company's beginnings, ups and downs, and all-arounds.  From the early years, when both Couch and Stephenson were still working part-time as pharmacists and recording whoever, whatever they could to make ends meet, to the first big hits by King Floyd ("Groove Me") and Jean Knight ("Mr. Big Stuff"), to Dorothy Moore's two-million copy megahit "Misty Blue," through some lean disco years, until Texas bluesman Z.Z. Hill surprisingly hit it big with his "Down Home Blues, a throwback to earlier soul and blues music that most in the business thought was long since dead.
From there, their course was set for the next several years to come, as Malaco, with the expert advice of veteran promo director Dave Clark, signed the great soul-blues artists that no other record company wanted:  Latimore, Denise LaSalle, Little Milton, Johnnie Taylor, and, of course, Bobby Blue Bland.

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As I was leaving from that first visit, Wolf gave me a brief tour of the warehouse and pulled off the shelf and handed me a big box CD set of Malaco hits that had been packaged for Malaco's 30-year anniversary in 1999.  Included in the box was a 44,500-word, 108-page booklet by Grammy Award Winning Author Rob Bowman (author of tons of liner notes and Soulville U.S.A.:  The Story of Stax Records).  Now, at Malaco's 50th anniversary, Bowman has expanded the booklet to include a bunch more photos from Malaco's archives, as well as how, with the passing of most of the old blues artists, Malaco transitioned to becoming the world's largest gospel music producer and to providing today samples for a myriad of modern rappers and hip-hop artists everywhere.
So somehow, through it all, with some luck, lots of hard work, and plenty of perseverance, Malaco Records has outlasted all the other once-successful independent record labels--Motown, Atlantic, Stax, Chess, et al.--to become, with Tommy Couch Jr. now at the helm, the oldest and still flourishing independent record company...by focusing, in different ways over the years, on one thing: recording great Black music primarily for a Black audience. 

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    Charles Farley is an author who lives and writes in Huntsville, Alabama.

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