Saturday, October 5, 2013

Lefty and Some Random Thoughts About Music





I can't get enough of Lefty Frizzell. He even wears the string tie. Elvis and Johnny Cash and Buddy Holly sort of dominated the 1958 era but Lefty generated more music than all of them. His songs didn't break any rules or set the standard but if you gave me a choice I would have to take Lefty's songs. That's more a testament to my honky-tonk heart than to quality of music because Buddy Holly was a brilliant pioneer and Elvis was the all time live entertainer (Michael Jackson is #2 only because Elvis made it OK to grab your crotch and Elvis did it when it was almost a criminal offense) and Johnny Cash wrote a lot of his own music and promoted himself better. Lefty is the performer Hank Williams Sr. would have been if he'd lived longer. Hank Sr. died before any of the proto-rock music arrived. Lefty never made the jump to rock and didn't want to, he never grabbed his crotch or shook his hips and apparently never played an electric guitar. He was pure Honky-Tonk with no ambition to bust genres. When you listen to a Lefty song you'll either get a slow blues or a slower blues...no big surprises on the jukebox in 1954 in Nashville. I love how the pianist is using a folding metal chair as a bench. It's like this performance is in a High School gymnasium. I met a guy in Oklahoma who had a voice like this...pure as a flowing river. Notice how he sings "I got those drinking cigarettes and smoking coffee blues..." at the end.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.