Blues News
New Open Stage Jam: Our Bar and Grille (New Brighton)
Oct 5th
From the TwinCitiesBlues.com In-Box:
OPEN JAM, ALL WELCOME! Every Wednesday night from 8:30 till close at the ‘OUR BAR and GRILLE’ in New Brighton Minnesota. 500 5th ave. 2 blocks west of 35W on county E2. All Styles of music welcome, origionial music encouraged. Piano, drums, amps, and mics provided. just bring your axe and have some fun! 651-332-5959
Our Bar & Grille
500 5th Ave NW
St Paul, MN 55112(651) 332-5950
Please note that it does state that it is open to All Styles of music but it sure doesn’t stop anyone from going on out and introducing the crowd to some blues music.
Boom Boom Steve V – CD Release Party
Sep 14th
Boom Boom Steve V and The Knockouts have announced their latest effort, Tuff Love, is now available for purchase and to celebrate the band will hosting several CD Release shows around the area.
Tuff Love features the fine playing of Dwight Dario on drums, John Schroder on bass and John Franken on guitar and backup vocals. Special guests also include Bruce McCabe on Piano and Wurlitzer on six of the ten songs, Jeremy Johnson on 2nd guitar for two Little Walter covers (Sad Hours and Come Back Baby) and also Mark “Good Time Willy” on backup vocals. Tuff Love features 10 songs which includes 3 covers and 7 original songs. The third cover song will be a song originally recorded by Lester Butler and Alex Schultz from the “13 Featuring Lester Butler” CD.
With an all-star backing band featuring the rhythm section of Dwight Dario and John Schroeder from Big George Jackson combined with the highly enjoyable song writing and guitar playing by John Franken, Tuff Love will easily be a “must have” release from the energetic and powerhouse harmonica player Boom Boom Steve Vonderharr.
The Tuff Love recording sessions took place in what should be known as the “Legendary” Subterranean Studios owned and operated by blues musician extraordinaire Jeremy Johnson. Every recording session that has come out of the studio has been blessed by Jeremy’s great talent as a recording engineer and have sounded terrific.
Come out and enjoy a great blues party and pick up a copy of the bands newest… Tuff Love:
Friday, September 18, 2009
with Special Guest
Bruce McCabe on Keyboards
Applewood Rustic Grill
(8:00 PM)
1996 Cliff Rd
Burnsville, MN 55337-1303
(952) 736-7777
Get directions
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Neumann’s Bar
2531 7th Ave E
St Paul, MN 55109-3066
(651) 770-6020
Get directions
Be sure to check back with Twin Cities Blues for an upcoming special spotlight on Boom Boom Steve V and The Knockouts featuring a review of Tuff Love, interview with the band and video footage from the CD release shows.
New W.C. Handy Book
Aug 4th
Here is some information on a new book about the life and times of W.C. Handy
W.C. Handy: The Life and Times of the Man Who Made the Blues
Story Source: Seattle Times‘W.C. Handy’: new book about the man who brought blues to the mainstream
By Mary Ann Gwinn
Seattle Times book editor
“W.C. Handy: The Life and Times of the Man Who Made the Blues”
by David Robertson
Knopf, 288 pp., $27.95
When I was growing up in the Mississippi Delta, the go-to big city was Memphis, a city that in the 1950s was starkly divided along black/white, rich/poor lines. So how was it that a statue of a nattily dressed black man, frozen in the act of moving his cornet into play, stood sentinel over Memphis’ Beale Street?
“Oh, that’s Mr. Handy,” said my father, as if I should already know. The question of how a black musician came to be enshrined in the memory of a white-dominated city remained, for the time being, unanswered.
Fifty years later, “W.C. Handy: The Life and Times of the Man Who Made the Blues” answered my questions.
Many musical biographies are technical, verbose and inaccessible. But “W.C. Handy,” the story of the musician, composer and bandleader who brought the blues to American ears, is an overdue recounting of a life story for whom the phrase “the power of positive thinking” seems to have been coined, and a readable history of how the music of black field hands powered into the American mainstream.
Born in 1873 in a log cabin in Florence, Ala., William Christopher Handy was encouraged by his minister father to take up education or the ministry, the only sure path to success for an educated black man of those times.
Instead, Handy jumped the rails. The small-town preacher’s boy bought a cornet for $1.75 (payable in installments) from a circus performer stranded in Florence and desperate for money. Handy served his musical apprenticeship in traveling brass bands. Though the money was generally good, his signature “St. Louis Blues” — I hate to see that evening sun go down — was inspired by a low time when Handy was jobless, homeless and “reduced to sleeping in the open air upon the cobblestone levees of the city’s Mississippi River docks.”
He traveled as a minstrel musician. Author David Robertson, an Alabama native, advances the theory that though minstrel music appeared to be a debased form of racist buffoonery, black minstrels were slyly mocking the racist attitudes of their white listeners. Minstrelsy was the precursor to vaudeville and ragtime, “the final innovation of the minstrel show.”
When a job as a bandleader in Clarksdale, Miss., in the heart of blues country, opened up, Handy discovered the music of black blues players, notably the “blue note,” the minor-themed undercurrent in blues music that invariably strikes an emotional chord with its listeners.
Handy worked the bones of the blues into his formal compositions, and the music began to make its way into the white world. Though he did not really “make” the blues, between 1904 and 1920, Handy’s “genius” “was his realizing the commercial potential of the Mississippi Delta blues music to reach beyond a regional and racial folk song and become part of mainstream American music,” Robertson writes.
Handy left Mississippi for Memphis. He became a musical entrepreneur, a leader of several dance bands and a composer who eventually would give the world “Memphis Blues,” “St. Louis Blues” and other American classics.
He suffered the indignity of being forced to sell the rights to “Memphis Blues” in 1912, in a period of economic straits, and lost thousands of dollars in royalties. But once he moved to New York City, his sheet-music company on Broadway was perhaps the largest black-owned business in the city in the 1920s and early 1930s. In 1940 he bought back the rights to “Memphis Blues.” Aided by Wall Street attorney and music scholar Edward Abbe Niles, Handy made a good living off his music until his death in 1958.
In the ’60s, when blues was being rediscovered by a new generation, it was fashionable to dismiss Handy’s contributions to the blues form. Robertson sets the record straight — W.C. Handy’s musicianship propelled American music from the age of Sousa to the birth of jazz.
Copyright © 2009 The Seattle Times Company

