Throughout Randall Bramblett's long, storied career as a sideman and as a solo artist, he has doggedly mined the sources of his earliest inspirations – soul, R&B, blues, and roots rock – for the lessons they teach about creative expression. As a result, his albums have always moved a little deeper, a little wider, and have taken enough chances with those forms that he's too mercurial to pin down – he's a marketing person's nightmare, but a real music fan's (and musician's) delight…
This DVD celebrates Chris Barber's 50th anniversary as a professional musician. Recorded at Germany's Hot Jazz Festival 2002, he presents his eleven-piece Big Chris Barber Band.One of the leaders of England's early-'60s trad jazz movement, Chris Barber (a solid trombonist) began leading his own bands in 1948. In 1954, trumpeter Pat Halcox joined Barber, and with the later additions of clarinetist Monty Sunshine, banjoist/singer Lonnie Donegan, and blues singer Ottilie Patterson, Barber had an all-star crew. Sunshine's hit version of 'Petite Fleur' made both Barber and the clarinetist into big names. Although his group was based in Dixieland, Barber has long been open-minded towards ragtime, swing, mainstream, blues, R&B, and rock.
When Malaco Records started out in the late 1960s, the label that small Southern R&B companies looked up to was Stax. The Jackson, MS-based Malaco, like the Memphis-based Stax, focused mainly on deep-fried Southern soul in the beginning – only in 1968 and 1969, Malaco was a struggling young operation that was fighting to stay afloat. But ironically, Malaco would still be in business long after Stax's 1975 demise, and it would continue to favor classic soul long after most labels had moved away from it. When other black-oriented independents were putting out urban contemporary, rap and house music in the 1980s and 1990s.
From the people who brought you 'Hillbillies In Hell'. War, Patriotism, Pathos, Paranoia and Propaganda in the Country Music Experience. Vinyl Relics recovered from abandoned Fall-Out Shelters and excavated from beneath wastelands of Radioactive Rubble. Country Music Artefacts from the Cold War Era: Hyper-Patriotic Anthems, Delirious Cowpoke Agitprop Diatribes, Peacenik Protestations and Heartfelt Homefront Lamentations. Years in the making - 'Cold War Countdown' presents 28 tempestuous tirades of Red-Scare Pinko-Subversion, Iron Curtain-Clad Simian Freedom Fighters, Bearded Despots, Flower Power Fall-Out, the War Wizened, the Walking Wounded and Heart-Wrenching Fallen Heroes.
Gospel Singer Essie Mae Brooks is finally getting a taste of the life her father envisioned for her many years ago.
Her late father, Ulysses Davis, was a drummer who performed locally around the family’s Perry, Georgia home playing "that Saturday night stuff," Brooks says. His dreams for young Essie Mae began after she excelled in singing in school. "Daddy always said if he had the money he would put me on the road, but he never had the money," recalls Brooks. "There were 10 of us children and we grew up on a farm, so there was not much money." Today, Brooks has five grown children and 15 grandchildren and still lives on the family farm in Perry. Through Music Maker she’s done some traveling, having performed in concerts in New York and Washington, DC, as well as in Italy…..