It is true there is not enough
                                     beauty in the world.
                                     It is also true that I am not
                                     competent to restore it.
                                     Neither is there candor, and here
                                     I may be of some use.
                                             from "October"

I've long been a fan of jazz vocalist Gregory Porter.  His creamy smooth baritone voice and catchy songwriting have made him a favorite for jazz aficionados worldwide for the last decade.  I saw him perform on a scorching Sunday afternoon at the 2018 Newport Jazz Festival where he held the audience enthralled for more than an hour with his unique blend of jazz and soul.  He left no doubt that he's not at all over-rated; that he is, in fact, "the real thing."
Now, after a three-year recording hiatus, he is back with his sixth studio album, "All Rise," that is his best effort to date.  Here is the ambitious performance that is the culmination of everything his voice and writing are capable of.  Instead of the often abstract, enigmatic lyrics of former releases, the songs here are more straight-forward and accessible, ranging from bombastic gospel numbers to sweet, romantic ballads, all with Porter's warm, funky, jazz tones out in front.  And where on previous albums Porter was backed by a proficient, but small jazz combo, here he is accompanied by a full horn section, a ten-person choir, and the London Symphony Orchestra string section, as well as his own well-drilled band, resulting in a much more lush, dynamic sound that, thanks to producer Troy Miller, does not sound at all over-produced.
Instead, "All Rise" turns out to be a surprising and welcome amalgam of all the award-winning singer has to offer.  Just what is called for in these troubled times.  Take a listen!
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When I lived in Kansas, I pretty much rooted for the K.U. basketball team, not so much the K.U. football team.  When I lived in Boston, I pretty much rooted for the Celtics, not so much the Patriots.  When I lived in Syracuse, I rooted for Jimmy Boeheim's Syracuse Orange basketball team, and halfheartedly for the Orange football team.  When I lived in El Paso, I cheered on Don Haskins's UTEP basketball team, but not so much UTEP's football team.

Now, I'm down here in SEC country where everything's the reverse (or topsyturvy, as we say here):  no one cares about basketball and everyone is crazy about college football.  So it has taken me a while (20+ years) to cotton to (as we say here) a favorite team.  If you live in Alabama, you have your druthers between the University of Alabama football team or the Auburn University football team.  That's it.

Well, this week I finally made up my mind when the news arrived that the entire Alabama football team, as well as other university athletes, coaches, and staff marched to protest racial injustice in the donald's America.  And it was led by none other than the famous Alabama coach Nick Saban, who has previously not shown much interest in anything except winning football games, which, of course, is more than enough to make him a true legend here in Alabama.

The group marched from the Mal Moore athletic facility on campus to the Foster Auditorium's schoolhouse door, where, if you remember your Alabama history, Alabama governor George Wallace infamously turned away two African American, would-be students in 1963, with these words:  "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

"Today I'm like a proud parent," Saban said at the end of the march.  "I'm proud of our team, I'm proud of our messengers over here and I'm proud of the message.  I'm very proud of the 'All lives can't matter until Black lives matter' video that we did early on that I think had a very positive impact.  That was something we did together as a team.  This is something that the team decided to do together as a team, so I'm very proud and supportive of what they are trying to say, and in a peaceful and intelligent way.  I'm very pleased to be here today...Through this process, I've learned  a lot from our players.  I don't get to see the world through the same lens that a lot of our players do.  I think I respect and appreciate the lens they see the world in and they live the world in...So this is what helped me grow in my role as a leader:  to listen to the players, to learn from the players and to give them the opportunity to do things that could impact social change today."

Now, I'm not naive enough to believe this one little demonstration is going change much down here in the "Heart of Dixie," which by the way is still plastered on every State of Alabama license plate.  But it's something.  If nothing more than to raise the hackles (as we say down here) of some of those cracker Alabama fans who will maybe consider the possibility, if only for a second, that racial equality is nearly as important as winning football games.

Roll Tide!

​

Well, it's political party convention time here in America.  And while we understandably don't hear much from the Republicans about the Pandemic, since their fearful leader has bungled the virus' spread so colossally, we do hear a lot about "socialism" and how the Democrats, if elected, are going to spread it faster and wider than COVID-19 itself.

So I thought it would be interesting to take the top ten most socialist countries, as reported by The Top Tens website, and see how their governments have so far fared in controlling the virus, compared to our's, per the website Statista:

Country             COVID-19 Deaths Per One Million Population, as of 8/27/2020

USA                         548.05

Sweden*                  571.24

France                      454.22

Netherlands              360.69

Canada                     246.66

Denmark                   107.46

Costa Rica                   77.21

Finland                        60.71

Norway                        49.68

Venezuela                     12.16

New Zealand                   4.5

​*The socialist government of Sweden has taken a largely hands-off approach in dealing with the virus, much as our's has here in America.

To be fair, nearly every form of government (socialist, democratic, monarchy, dictatorship, communist, you name it) has done better than the U.S. in doing the number one job of what a government is supposed to do:  protect its citizens.

                                   

Something is missing from this August.  Something besides a healthy world, financial security, racial equality, and any semblance of sanity.  Seems that on the second weekend of August, since 1988, the Sunflower River Blues & Gospel Festival has been celebrated in Clarksdale, Mississippi.  But not this year, when we need it the most.  The 33rd annual edition has been postponed until next year on August 13, 14, and 15, assuming the COVID-19 pandemic is over or at least under control by then.

So in the absence  of this year's festival, I thought I would reminisce a bit about Sunflower Fests past.

The first time I visited Clarksdale was some time around 1985, a few years before the first festival in 1988.  I was down there with Jewel Harris to try to sell a library computer system to the Clarksdale Public Library.  But when the library's director, Sid Graves, found out I was a blues fan, he and I left Jewel to demo the system to the library's staff, while we went on an afternoon tour of Clarksdale's juke joints.  Sid had started a blues museum in the attic of the old Carnegie Library on the corner of First and Delta.  It wasn't much at the time, but it was a start.  After a quick tour of the museum, Sid drove me all over town, seeking a juke joint that might be hosting some live music that night.  Sid knew every juke joint proprietor in town, and, being in the Mississippi Delta where southern hospitality is nothing but de rigueur, we had to stay awhile and chat and accept at least one, or more often two, beers, before we stumbled on to the next joint.  Well, we didn't find any place that was playing live blues that night, it being mid-week and all, but we did meet with a nice buzz before we returned to the library.  There were a lot of jukes in and around Clarksdale back then.  Not so many nowadays.  

The first Sunflower River Blues & Gospel Festival was organized by Jim O'Neal, the founding editor of Living Blues magazine, and Dr. Patricia Johnson, funded by downtown merchants, and held on the banks of the Sunflower River between Sunflower and Delta Avenues.  And the lineup was stellar:  Jelly Roll Kings, Jack Owens and Bud Spires, Jessie Mae Hemphill, Boogaloo Ames, Othar Turner and the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band, and concluding with Son Thomas and Otis Rush.
​

Othar Turner

'The 1990 fest featured another all-star cast, including Snooky Pryor, Vasti Jackson, Katie Webster, Moss Allison, and Jessie Mae Hemphill.

The 1997 festival boasted two big stars: Inverness, Mississippi native Little Milton and Clarksdale native Ike Turner.  Tip:  Walk south from downtown under the railroad underpass on Issaquena Avenue.  Look up at the first brick building on your left.  You'll see some faded paint near the top, reading "Turner's," the last remnant of what was once Ike Turner's Lounge many years ago when Issaquena was the hottest blues strip in the Delta, maybe in the world.

​

My first festival was in 1998 and featured Rufus Thomas, Lynn White, R.L. Burnside, Big Jack Johnson, Clayton Love, and Frank Frost and Sam Carr.  Unfortunately, Saturday night's performance was rained out.

It was dry for the the 1999 festival.  And the weather and the music were as sweltering as a Delta August can get:  Cedell Davis, Big Jack Johnson, Anson Funderburg and the Rockets with Sam Meyers, Bobby Rush, and Koko Taylor.  Local vocalist and newcomer O.B. Buchana launched his long and storied southern soul career on Friday night and stole the show.

​

O.B. Buchana

In 2002, the organizers brought back, by popular demand, O.B. Buchana and Big Jack Johnson.  Saturday's show closed with dynamite performances by Eddie Cotton, Charlie Musselwhite, who owns property in Clarksdale, and the star of the show: Bobby "Blue" Bland.

​

                    Bobby "Blue" Bland

2003 highlights included O.B. Buchana again, Floyd Taylor, James "Super Chikan" Johnson, David "Honeyboy" Edwards, and Bob Margolin's Blues Allstars, featuring other Muddy Waters band alumni:  Pinetop Perkins, Hubert Sumlin, and Carey Bell. When the Allstars came on stage, they were absent their keyboard player, Pinetop Perkins, who, oblivious, was quietly chatting with me down in front of the stage.  I shooed him up there, and then it was almost like being back at Theresa's Lounge in Chicago.

Latimore, Duwayne Burnside & the Mississippi Mafia, and the North Mississippi Allstars headlined the festival in 2006.

O.B. Buchana closed out Friday evening in 2009, with James "Super Chikan" Johnson, Cedric Burnside and Lightnin' Malcolm, and Betty LaVette doing the honors on Satrurday.

                                               James "Super Chikan" Johnson​

The 2012 lineup was arguably the best of the festival's history to that point.  Friday brought out O.B. Buchana and Bobby Rush back to back.  If you've never seen a Bobby Rush show, you owe it to yourself to hurry to the next one near you.  Rush, now well into his 80s probably doesn't have a lot of performing years left, but his show is just that, a real show:  the last of the barnstorming, vaudeville, burlesque, blues extravaganzas, complete with double entendre lyrics, dancing girls, and good ol' Saturday night, naughty, tongue-in-cheek nastiness--an act that has been honed over the years to please, amuse, and raise the eyebrows of most everyone.  Think a cross between Redd Foxx, Cab Calloway, and Pigmeat  Markham!  Closing the festival that year was Charlie Musselwhite and Robert Plant and Patty Griffin.  One can argue whether Plant is a blues singer, but as he explained to be at breakfast at the B&B where we were both staying, his act is not really the blues, but instead more of a tribute to the roots music that has influenced him the most.  It was nonetheless good music.

​

                                           Bobby Rush

The 2017 festival featured a great lineup of festival favorites:  James "Super Chikan" Johnson, Nathanial Kimble, O.B. Buchana, Big George Brock, and Charlie Musselwhite.

                                              Charlie Musselwhite

​We'll be waiting, impatiently, for next year's festival.

​

This is a 3-disc set of most of Bland's earliest recordings, during his big, hit-making heydays at Duke, with arranger Joe Scott and many accomplished musicians.  Not as comprehensive and clear sounding as MCA's 1992 4-disc compendium that was mastered from the original recordings, this is an uneven collection by London's Not Now Music Limited, a so-called grey market producer, that apparently remastered these tunes from other CDs, since the original Duke masters were destroyed by a warehouse fire in 2008.  But, still fun.
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I love gospel music and the gospel music I love most is the soulful, blues-based, tight vocal harmony of groups like the Holmes Brothers, the Blind Boys of Alabama, and the Dixie Hummingbirds.  This male quartet, of Anthony Daniels, Antwan Daniels, Marcus Sugg, and Dexter Weaver, is from rural North Carolina, near Greenville, and keeps alive this rollicking gospel tradition.  Recorded in Memphis with local musicians, the album also hearkens back to the good ol' days of STAX, Sun, and Hi recordings of the 1960s and '70s.  If this disc doesn't set your toes to tappin', nothing will.  Can I get a witness?  Hell, yeah!
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Well, what can be said of Bob Dylan that hasn't been said before?  He is truly the voice of my generation, and, now pushing 80, he remains as astonishing as he was in 1962 when his first of 39 studio albums was released.  Yeah, his voice is more gravelly than ever, and his lyrics often rambling and obscure, but also as welcoming and refreshing as a summer shower.  You'll find folk, country, rock, and blues here, done simply in the Dylan style.  And, most importantly, you'll hear a delightful blend of all of these that results in the closest thing to a panacea for a pandemic that we're likely to experience this summer.
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