Skip to main content

Ella Fitzgerald - My Heart And I Decided

Still, that statue didn’t quite jibe with me. The Father of the Blues depicted in the statue looked calm and grandfatherly. He wore a suit and tie and held his horn poised to play. In every photograph of Handy I had ever seen, he was always dressed impeccably. How could this man be the father of the rough, untamed music that I knew to be the blues? He looked nothing like the cafe, juke joint people my family described, and I suspected they used to be.

In fact, Handy was a formally trained musician who traveled all over the world. And though he wasn’t looking for the blues, the blues found him all the same. The story goes that he fell asleep waiting for a train and woke to find a man playing the weirdest music he’d ever heard on the guitar. This chance encounter with the blue sparked a passion in Handy that became his life’s work. But, at first at least, he didn’t create blues, be merely absorbed the raw, primitive sounds and wrote them down. Perhaps this tale planted a seed of storytelling in me, because what I learned from this was the one who writes it down get the power. That if you tell or write down stories, you can get a statue erected in your honor, even in Memphis, even if you are black. Children will be made to remember your name, if just for one month a year.


Ella Fitzgerald - My Heart And I Decided
  • First release in: January 1943
  • Written by: Walter Donaldson
  • Recorded in: July 1942

"By the 1990s, Ella had recorded over 200 albums. In 1991, she gave her final concert at New York’s renowned Carnegie Hall. It was the 26th time she performed there."

See previous Song of the Day 

Labels:
Location: United States

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jackson Browne - Kisses Sweeter than Wine

Europe has a rich history of embracing blues and jazz music. In the early 20th century, American jazz musicians began touring Europe, introducing the continent to a new sound that was unlike anything they had ever heard before. Jazz became an instant hit among European audiences, and many European musicians began incorporating jazz elements into their music. Today, jazz festivals are held all over Europe, attracting thousands of fans from all over the world. In addition, many European cities have thriving blues scenes, with local bands and musicians performing regularly. Blues and jazz have also made their way to Asia, where they have found a devoted fan base. Japan, in particular, has a thriving jazz scene, with many Japanese musicians achieving international recognition. In addition, China has also seen a rise in the popularity of jazz music in recent years. Jazz festivals are now held in major Asian cities such as Tokyo, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, attracting jazz lovers from all over ...
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

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