Theme from Rawhide - Blues Brothers

 

The Blues Brothers came out of Saturday Night Live - a retro blues band featuring Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi. In this sequence from the movie, Jake and Elwood and the boys wind up at a cowboy bar trying to make a few bucks to keep gas in the car by replacing the band that had been originally booked. When the set went south, they switch seemlessly to the first cowboy song they can think of - the theme to the TV show Rawhide. They pull it off too and end the set singing Tammy Wynette's "Stand by Your Man." I love that the stage is screened in with chicken wire and there's a bullwhip hanging on the wall. The owner says they have both kinds of music, country AND western. I love it. Kinda highlights the advantages of a musician being versatile............or any independent entrepreneur for that matter. Give the customer what he wants, that's my motto.

Tom

Polly Wolly Doodle

My Grandpa used to play this song on his harmonica when we were kids. He had a verse about a peanut on the railroad track, his heart was all aflutter, and along came a train with a clickety-clack and it was toot toot peanut butter. He could always get a laugh out of anyone ten years old and younger. 

"Polly Wolly Doodle" was my favorite one of his harmonica tunes. He could do this triple tonguing deal that I have never been able to pull off. My #2 favorite song of his was a somewhat risque ballad called "I Never Loved Her Like I Loved Her Last Night in the Back of My Cadillac 8".  I think there may have been a story behind that, because my grandmother tended to get flustered when he played it. As I learned later, Grandpa and Honeymama (my grandmother's grandkid name) went out on a date one night and drove to Itasca, found a preacher and got married. Then Grandpa took her home and they didn't tell her father, my great grand papaw, about if for two weeks cause they were both afraid of him. I rather suspect my Honeymama and Grandpa did NOT drive straight home from Itasca that momentous date night. I've driven on those back roads and there are plenty of places to park I can tell you. Grandpa always had a little grin on his face when he played "Cadillac 8". Honeymom just rolled her eyes and left the room.

A friend of mine hooked me on Leon Redbone years ago and I especially loved his bluesy mellow version of Polly Wolly Doodle. I learned to play the song on the harmonica by playing along with a Leon Redbone tape I recorded off the original vinyl album. It was a little scratchy, but that kind of goes with old Leon's style..............and Grandpa's.  Here's Leon Redbone with Polly Wolly Doodle:

Singin' polly wolly doodle all day...

Singin' polly wolly doodle all day...

Singin' polly wolly doodle all day...

That's the way I remember the ending.

Tom

Unfriended

I actually got unfriended by someone the other day. It's actually not that unusual for me. I tend to be on the outspoken side of the conversational spectrum and there are some folks who cannot bear to be contradicted. It's not just politics. I've lost both hard left and hard right "friends" who apparently were only friends so long as I did not bring up any good points when I disagreed with them.

My musical tastes are distinctly unserious, though I can blubber along over a sad love song with the best of them. Of course one of my favorites, "I've Got Tears in My Ears From Lying on My Back, Crying My Heart Out Over You" probably crosses over several musical genres in a way unlikely to draw it any Grammy or CMA awards.

One of my favorite unserious, yet at the same time strangely poignant musicians, is the inimitable Garrison Keillor, star to the long-running radio show, A Prairie Home Companion. That Keillor makes a living with a live radio show is a testament to both his talent and mule-headedness in this era of on-demand videos and Mp3 players.

This Keillor song addresses the issue I brought up in the first paragraph of this weblog - unfriending. In true Garrison Keillor fashion, the song gently sticks a pin in the over-inflated self-importance of the Facebook Generation.  I liked it so much that I put it on my Mp3 player!

Here's another version (he changes them almost every performance.  This is the funniest one and the one that I have on my Mp3 player.

The last one is my favorite version.