Skip to main content

Grant Stewart - Modinha

That sound draws thousands to Clarksdale each year for the annual Juke Joint Festival. They come for the familiar licks and wails. Over the years, the town of around 14,000 people, nestled among the cotton fields of northwestern Mississippi, has produced some of the world's most famous blues stars. Many blues greats, including Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, worked the surrounding plantations.

A mix of slide guitar with a howl to the human condition. Blues houses, known as juke joints, opened up. By the 20s and 30s, the first stars emerged, including Robert Johnson, who, per legend, sold his soul to the devil just outside of Clarksdale in exchange for his guitar chops.

These kinds of experiences are what helped forge the blues in the Delta, where places like Clarksdale were built into boomtowns on the backs of slaves and later, sharecroppers. But as musical tastes changed over the years, local blues houses closed down. Farm work dried up. Today, Clarksdale sits in one of the poorest counties in the poorest region of a stubbornly poor state.


Grant Stewart - Modinha
Written by: Antônio Carlos Jobim
First release in: May 1958
Released in: 2007

"At 17 Grant Stewart took up the tenor saxophone and was soon playing with such master saxophonists as Pat Labarbara and Bob Mover. By 18 he was leading a quartet in Toronto for a regular gig."

See previous Song of the Day

Comments

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...

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...

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