Skip to main content

Ron Thompson - Marie Marie

New Orleans’s blues heritage encompasses two related traditions, small band, jazz based blues and piano professors who delighted audiences with their combination of artistry and showmanship. Both traditions trace their origins to the turn of the twentieth century, when solo pianists could earn good money by playing in labor camps, informal drinking establishments, and legalized houses of prostitution in Storyville. As the century progressed, New Orleans pianists absorbed the newer boogie woogie and stride piano styles while remaining faithful to the Spanish and French influences that filtered into the city through the Caribbean. These styles flavored early R&B and rock ’n roll with relaxed tempos and strong, syncopated rhythmic patterns that came to be known as the New Orleans sound.

At the same time, traveling medicine shows, vaudeville, and neighborhood dance halls fostered a small band tradition that shaped early jazz. In fact, early blues and early jazz were so thoroughly intertwined in New Orleans that in many cases it was impossible to tease them apart... The blues originated in rural areas and small towns, of course, and musicians from less populated parts of Louisiana also contributed to the state’s blues heritage. Beginning in the late 1940s, Alexandria native Little Walter explored ways to combine blues harmonica with electric amplification, cupping a harmonica and microphone in his hands while playing.


Ron Thompson - Marie Marie
  • Released on: Treat Her Like Gold/No Bad Days album
  • Released in: 1983
  • Genre: Blues, Electric Blues

"Ron Thompson was an American electric blues and blues rock guitarist, singer and songwriter. Thompson commented, blues is like a medicine, or religion to me, it'll cleanse your soul."

See previous Song of the Day

Labels:
Location: United States

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Moondog - Behold

The history of jazz has been one of fusion. Its musicians and composers have continually drawn upon a huge range of different musics to create the rich and diverse tapestry that is world jazz today. Jazz is an evolving tradition of music making. And how often, in the life stories of individual jazz musicians, do we see these same patterns operating at microcosm? The richness of Turkish music and culture sometimes seems at odds with its turbulent and cruel history. In 1979... the country suffered its third military take over in thirty years... Every kind of music was in Turkey at that point. But it was not appreciated. To understand the culture of the country, with those three military takeovers, Turkey could not go anywhere. Musically, it was very difficult. But things were beginning to happen. Traditional Turkish music is essentially monophonic, rich in melody and rhythm but with little by way of harmony. The contrast with western music, with its beautiful harmonies but rhythmic weakn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Veronica Swift - A Little Taste

There has always been an uncomfortable tension between rhythm and blues and rock and roll, a cyclical influence that vacillates between inspiration, appropriation and separation. Popular music has broken off into categories of rock, pop, country, and R&B, each with their own origin stories. But R&B and rock, usually codified as vastly different, Black and white styles, have long been intertwined in ways our historical memory may have us forget.  Despite the innovation that comes from separation, rock and R&B always find their way back to each other. In recent years, rock veterans have turned to the genre’s classics for inspiration. Queens of the Stone Age veered from their typical hard rock with 2017’s Villains, a dance y album inspired by frontman Josh Homme’s love of 1920s jazz and swing, other Black genres that laid the groundwork for the popular music of today. The whitewashing of rock’s history has oversimplified music’s malleability and silenced the voices of Amer...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Gap Band - The Sun Don't Shine Everyday

The Gap Band - The Sun Don't Shine Everyday Genre: RnB Released in: 1984 Duration: 5:14 "The Gap Band was most successful when working with producer Lonnie Simmons, with four consecutive gold records. Their party train soon slowed to a stop. They reformed in the 90s and occasionally toured and attempted a comeback album." See Previous Song of the Day 
Post a Comment
Read more