Bearded Gospel Men

31 Days of Fun, Satire, and Deeper Meaning of the Godly Beard!

Blues Masters at the Crossroads. A global audience returns year-after-year to worship the blues at Blue Heaven Studios in Salina, Kansas. For the first time Analogue Productions presenting six sets recorded live in 2014 at Blues Masters at the Crossroads October 17-18. And it's the first live blues concert recorded entirely in Direct Stream Digital. Includes the sets by Rip Lee Pryor, Moreland & Arbuckle, Joe Beard+Lazy Lester, George Brock, Marquise Knox and his band, Sonny Green, and none-other than the soul-blues belter Mighty Sam McClain.

It was a musical cocktail born in a marketing meeting: Two parts easy listening, one part jazz, a healthy dollop of conga drums, a sprinkling of bird calls, and a pinch of textless choir. Serve garnished with an alluring woman on the album jacket for best results. Liberty Records co-founder Si Waronker called it Exotica; the soundtrack for a mythical air conditioned Eden, packaged for mid-century, tiki torch-wielding armchair safariers. In the five years after Exotica—Martin Denny’s 1957 landmark Liberty debut—arrived, hundreds of other ethnographic forgeries washed up in record racks all over the U.S., bearing titles like Sophisticated Savage, Sacred Idol, Chant of the Jungle, Polynesian Paradise, Exotic Paradise, Taboo, Primitiva, Forbidden Island, Afrodesia, Hypnotique, Percussion Exotique, and a barrel’s worth of other portmanteaus. “All of those ica and itiva endings I came up with because I thought I was being cute,” Waronker said. “And I don’t know why, but nobody got wise.”