First off I wanted to post the two tunes I talked about in my first post your anyone who wants to hear em, the Al Ferrier tunes I’m The Man
can be heard here: , the 45 is on Excello (the b-side of “Hey Baby”, you can get it on the excellent ACE CD The Rockin’ South, a collection of Excello rockabilly). It’s my favorite type of rockabilly tunes– a greaseball with a pompadour and a hard on tellin’ the world how cool he is.
The Percy Mayfield tunes- The Voice Within is here: , it’s a whole different bag of shells. The original 78 is on Specialty and you can find it on the Specialty CD Memory Pain. Mayfield was perhaps the most tortured and forlorn songwriter of the R&B era. He struck gold in ’51 with “Please Send Me Somebody To Love” which topped the R&B charts but after a car wreck disfigured his mug he stopped performing and turned to full time songwriting and recording. Mayfield wrote many of Ray Charlies early 60’s hits like “Hit The Road Jack” as well as Elvis’ “Stranger In My Own Hometown”. his version of that one (even better than Elvis’ for my $) is on the Rhino/Handmade CD Percy Mayfield My Jug & I a re-issue of an early 60’s LP he cut with Ray Charles and his band and was originally issued on Charles’ Tangerine label.
So it’s 9/11 here in New York. Since I’ve spent the last thirty one years living in lower Manhattan, of course I saw it, smelled it,
got my lungs permanetly damaged by the whole mess. My only comment now is exactly what I was thinking when I saw the first tower fall over– “there goes our civil rights”!. I was right. I’ll try and stick to cultural issues in these posts but I wanted to get that one in. It’s records like these that make me miss doing the radio show.
Speaking of my old radio show (with tons of shows archived and podcasted at
it was fun doing the WFMU interview with Rex, you can hear it archived at http://www.wfmu.org (follow the links to Rex’s show, I was on Aug. 9th). Of course I got censored (I pre-taped the interview at WNYC’s new ultra swank studios). What got cut out was this:
“Holly George Warren, that bug eyed freak ripped me off for $500 for the article I wrote for the crummy book about the blues”! (I won’t mention the title as I refuse to plug the thing) but it was part of the merch package to go along with Martin Scorsese’s crappy blues documentry that ran on PBS (the only good thing in that whole six hour + wank was the footage of JB Lenoir that was part of the Wim Wenders episode). Maybe I’ll dig out my contract and post it here. I like how she just refused to answer my e-mails on the subject when six months later I still hadn’t been paid. Then, shamless as ever writes me (two years later) to ask for free info for her very dull Gene Autry bio. It’s not like I really need $500, it’s the principle of the thing, a so called friend, who has never been shy about asking for favors (like a job for her husband) but then will turn around and beat me for a pissant amount of money and pretend like it never happened. I hope those bug eyes explode the next time you lie to a writer.
I’ll try and post more over the weekend, I’m starting to feel like I have something to say again, after talking myself out over the twelve years of weekly broadcasts.