Skip to main content

The Hold Steady - The Prior Procedure

During a 1975 interview, B.B. King told William Ferris, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, how bricks were used to make a one string. Once you nailed this nail in there, put that wire around these two nails, like one on this end and one on the other and wrap it tight. Then you’d take a couple of bricks and you’d put one under this side and one under that one that would stretch this wire and make it tighter. And you’d keep pushing that brick, stretching this wire, making it tight until it would sound like one string on the guitar... Blues musicians also used baling wire to make one and two stringed instruments similar to those found throughout West Africa, where they are fashioned with resonators made of carved wood, a gourd, or a tin can. When I was about ten years old I made a fiddle out of a cigar box, a guitar out of goods boxes for my buddy Louis Carter, and we would play for the white people’s picnics. Big Joe Williams recalled making a one string guitar for himself as a child by stapling two thread spools to a small box and stretching bailing wire between the spools. He played it with the neck off a half pint whisky bottle. Harmonica players also used bailing wire to make neck racks for their harps so they could play guitar and harmonica at the same time.

When a conductor got a locomotive steaming at top speed, he was said to be balling the jack, as in they were balling the jack at the time of the wreck. The train was the jack short for the jackass carrying the load. To ball meant to go flat out, pedal to the metal, and came from the railman’s hand gesture signaling the crew to go faster. By the 1920s, the expression balling the jack had leapt from the rail yards into the popular lexicon as an expression for any wild, all out effort, from dancing to sex to gamblers risking everything on a single toss of the dice. Shortened to balling, it came to mean having a wild time in and out of bed. The phrase was given a push by the Balling the Jack fad, which reportedly began as a sexy juke joint dance involving plenty of bumping and grinding. It evolved into a group dance involving vigorous hand clapping and chanting or Balling the Jack for the Follies based on the African American ragtime tune. The Balling the Jack craze swept white America, eventually getting mixed in with the Lindy Hop to become a popular swing step.
Source: The Language of The Blues by Robert Sabin


The Hold Steady - The Prior Procedure
  • Produced by: Josh Kaufman
  • Released in: February 19, 2021
  • Released on: The Prior Procedure album

"The Hold Steady is Bobby Drake drummer, Craig Finn on vocals, Tad Kubler guitar and vocals, Franz Nicolay on keyboards, Galen Polivka bass) and Steve Selvidge guitar and vocals."

See previous Song of the Day

Labels:
Location: United States

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Psychotic Reactions - Skip To My Lou

It expresses the emotions of angst, anger, and lust in some of the only ways that are accepted by society. The history of this edgy music genre dates back to the 1950s. It was formed by a combination of the blues, gospel music, and country. Throughout the decades, rock ‘n roll has evolved and become famous for being the genre that’s continued to push the boundaries of music, and, sometimes, the cultural boundaries of society itself. In the 1950s rock ‘n roll could be defined as rhythm and blues. In the 1960s it was partial to new musical styles such as folk rock and soul. And in the 1970s hard rock was born. From the 1980s to the present, technology has had an enormous impact on the music industry. Good taste is the enemy of the revolution. This remark epitomizes the spirit of rock ‘n roll. You’re not expected to conform, you’re expected to be yourself… no matter what anyone thinks. You are admired deeply for expressing emotions such as anger, heartbreak, and sadness through music in a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Pat Moran Quartet - Come Rain Or Come Shine

The very institutional acceptance that many musicians sought in the mid to late 20th century has hitched jazz to a broken and still segregated education system. Partly as a result, the music has become inaccessible to, and disconnected from, many of the very people who created it, young Black Americans, poorer people and others at the societal margins. Of the more than 500 students who graduate from American universities with jazz degrees each year, less than 10 percent are Black, according to Department of Education statistics compiled by DataUSA. In 2017, the last year with data available, precisely 1 percent of jazz degree grads were Black women. The education is the anchor... We should be questioning our education system. Is it working? Is there a pipeline into the university for indigenous Black Americans to play their music, and learn their music? I don’t think that exists. Source: Jazz Has Always Been Protest Music. Can It Meet This Moment? by Giovanni Russonello The Pat Moran Q...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kenny Dorham - Like Someone In Love Take 2

In the early 20th century, the blues was considered disreputable as white audiences began listening to blues. Blues came into its own as an important part of the country’s relatively new popular culture in the 1920s with the recording, first, of great female classic blues singers and, then, of the country folk blues singers of the Mississippi Delta, the Piedmont of the Carolinas, and Texas. The first copyrighted song was in 1912, the Dallas Blues. As huge numbers of African Americans left the South at this time due to failed Reconstruction, dismal economic conditions, oppression in the South and the hope of better treatment in the North between 1915 and 1940s, the blues went with them, and settled in the urban centers of the North, especially Chicago. A more urban, electric blues developed as a result, which eclipsed the rural blues of the South and eventually became both rock and roll and what would become known as rhythm and blues. Blues fell somewhat out of popular favor until the l...
Post a Comment
Read more