CORFU: BLUES & GOSPEL BLUES GIG, 3 JUNE

This is the set list for Friday 3 June, with some notes on the songs.

The Soul of a Man- recorded 1930 by Texas street-singing evangelist, a great gospel blues artist called Blind Willie Johnson. What IS the soul of a man? Answer if you can! Wim Wenders made a film about the blues called “The Soul of a Man”, partly inspired by this song, “the perfect song to come from heaven or from outer space”, he wrote, adding that. “The blues is a very existential medium, as it goes to the core of things”.
Lonesome Valley: probably a traditional or mid 19th century camp-meeting missionary hymn in origin, this spiritual has been recorded by many artists from the Carter Family (Memphis, 1930) to Eric Bibb. “You got to walk that lonesome valley all by yourself”.
If your nerve, deny you. A composition by Raul Scacchi from a collection of songs based on poems by Emily Dickinson: Emails to Emily
You gotta serve somebody: An evangelical and fundamentalist 1979 Bob Dylan song from “Slow Train Coming”, recorded soon after his conversion and from the beginning of his born-again Christian period. I’m not sure about the stark choice he gives us, or the authority of the theological message! A song to celebrate his recent 70th birthday.

Bob's version

Another video

Fixin to Die, a classic and poetic Mississippi Delta bottleneck blues in Open G tuning by Bukka White, who served two years for assault in Parchman Farm Penitentiary. In 1930 he’d been known as “The Singing Preacher”, but he shot a man in 1937. Like Leadbelly, his music helped to get him out of prison. He sang gospel songs as well as blues like this one, written before he was released from Parchman Farm in 1940. Samuel Charters described it as a “strange song that seems to be almost a hymn”.

The Nights are drawing in. A song of mine- not autobiographical!- about a young man who has to work in London on a low wage while his girlfriend lives it up in Corfu. Arranged by Raul Scacchi.

Will the circle be unbroken? A sad but ultimately uplifting and hopeful spiritual sung by both black and white Americans in many different versions, blues and bluegrass. The first version of the song was written by gospel composers Ada Habershon and Charles Gabriel in 1907, and was recorded by various groups in the 1920s. The refrain was the same, but the lyrics of the verses were quite different. Our version was first recorded by the Carter Family in 1933- at around the time of the marriage break-up of AP and Sara Carter - and again in 1935, both versions with new lyrics and verses about death and bereavement grafted on to the existing chorus (note by Tony Russell in “The Carter Family”); it was melodically similar to the gospel song “When I lay my burden down”.

Peace in the Valley (c 1939), written by Revd. Thomas A Dorsey in the late 1930s, before the outbreak of World War 2. Revd. Dorsey was on a train, passing through a valley. “Horses, cows, sheep were all grazing together in this little valley. Everything seemed so peaceful…it made me wonder what’s the matter with humanity? What’s the matter with mankind? Why couldn’t man live in peace like the animals down there?” (From “Sing Your Heart Out, Country Boy” by Dorothy Horstman). One of the first spiritual songs to be recorded by Elvis Presley, perhaps his most deeply-felt. Although criticised by church-leaders in the early days of rock ‘n’ roll, Elvis and his parents had attended Pentecostal services at the small wooden First Assembly of God church in Tupelo, where he would have been introduced to emotionally-charged gospel singing, which he always loved.

Midnight Special. A traditional prison blues, made famous by Leadbelly (born 1889), who served sentences for assault and murder, and who made several prison escapes. His singing and playing ultimately won him the pardon of the Governor of Texas in 1925. Leadbelly learned this song in prison and added some of his own verses: it’s about the lights of a train which flashed through the windows of prisoners’ cells; they could also hear the train whistle echo across Sugarland- the Central State Prison Farm, near Houston, Texas:a poignant reminder of life beyond the prison walls (The Life and Legend of Leadbelly, Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell). But the midnight special train was also a symbol of freedom, maybe even of salvation. But Leadbelly was soon back in Prison, at Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana, for assaulting a man at a Salvation Army Band concert. This time he spent four and a half years inside. Legend has it that he sang his way out of jail, and that he was pardoned once again, this time by the Governor of Louisiana. In fact he was let out on parole. Leadbelly was a religious man, but he was also violent.

Needed Time. A moving spiritual which I first heard in recordings by gospel singer Sister Clara Hudman, “the Georgia Peach” and later by blues singer Lightnin Hopkins; more recently by Eric Bibb. The Lightnin’ Hopkins version was featured in the 1972 film called “Sounder”. Sung by a broken man or woman at the end of his or her resources, finally realising that NOW really is the NEEDED time.

There’s a Man going Round Taking Names: Leadbelly would introduce this as “an old spiritual, one of the first spiritual songs ever was sung. Before the people could sing it, they’d moan it” (The Leadbelly Songbook).

PART 2

Where’s that Good Samaritan Gone? I wrote this song in Ethiopia in the early 1970s, before the Ethiopian Revolution that deposed Emperor Haile Selassie after the “Unknown Famine” of 1973. It’s about the feudal system and the rich landlords who had once acted benignly towards the peasants, but who apparently felt no pity once the famine came and who were only to ready to exploit people rather than to act charitably. “They made them eat the desert sand”. Arranged by Raul Scacchi and sung tonight by Corina Hamilton.

Good Rockin’ Tonight: my vote for the first rock ‘n’ roll song ever recorded: in 1947 by Roy Brown and Wyonie Harris, and given the rockabilly blues treatment by Elvis Presley in 1954 at the Sun Studio in Memphis. His second record, and still one of the most exciting! My chance to use my Aboriginal sound-sticks!

Rank Stranger, a bluegrass sacred song made famous by the Stanley Brothers in 1960, written by gospel writer Albert Brumley in 1942. About a man going back to his hometown after many years, but finding no one who knows or remembers him- they’re all complete, rank strangers, except he hears the voice of another stranger- the voice of God? He understands that he will meet his old friends up in heaven where they won’t feel like strangers ever again.

Folsom Prison Blues. I seem to like both train and prison songs. Johnny Cash gave us this one early in his career, his second record on the Sun Record label, at the end of 1955. It was based on another song, Crescent City Blues, composed by Gordon Jenkins and sung by Beverly Mahr (1953).

The Nomad. Another of my African songs, which is partly about Ethiopia, partly about Kenya, but also a lament about how fast the world changes. It could apply to the loss of the traditional way of life of nomadic or semi-nomadic people in Africa, to the Australian Aboriginal people, or indeed to the Saraktsani or Vlachs of Epirus. The lyrics refer to wooden pillows, the thumb piano, gourds of sour milk. Arranged by Raul Scacchi and sung by Corina Hamilton.

Lysistrata, or The Last Waltz: a composition by Raul Scacchi, from his New Romantics album, Explorations of Love. Raul says this is a song against war, written during the second Iraq war. People of our generation may detect hints of Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind”. “Many white doves and blackbirds still waiting for answers lost in the wind: Making love never stopped any war”. The title alludes to Aristophanes’ Ancient Greek comedy about a “disbander of armies”, Lysistrata, and to a woman’s attempt to put an end to the Peloponnesian War by persuading Greek women to deny sexual privileges to their men, as a means of forcing them to make peace. The theme of the song is also the Dance of Death, the man with the scythe leading people away (remember Bergman's "The Seventh Seal"?).

Thirty One. I had just arrived in Nairobi when I wrote this, missing old friends, thinking that life was short and that I was already over the hill. It’s also about the fate of various friends, but also a plea for tolerance. Arranged by Raul Scacchi with something of a Cajun feel.

The Hobo. John Lee Hooker recorded various versions of this blues, but the one I like best was a live version from the Newport Folk Festival. I got to know John Lee Hooker in 1964, and he recorded the soundtrack for a student film I made at Oxford. I don’t know why I have always been fascinated by the idea of the hobo, the nomad, the wanderer: maybe because of early hitch-hiking experiences on the road, followed by a peripatetic career, living and working in many countries around the world. I really empathise with this blues song.

See That My Grave is Kept Clean: a 1927 folk blues hymn by Texas-born Blind Lemon Jefferson (born 1893), which we’ve combined with a few verses from Blind Willie Johnson’s “You Gonna Need Somebody on your Bond” (1929). One critic (C. J. Farley in “Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues”) wrote that the Jefferson song “captures something timeless and existential: the fear that all people have about what will be their posthumous legacy and the wish to have it preserved”. Jefferson’s family had been active in the conservative and anti-Missionary Shiloh Primitive Baptist Church.

Roll ‘em Pete, made famous in 1938-1939 by blues shouter Big Joe Turner and boogie-woogie pianist Pete Johnson, at the Carnegie Hall concert, “From Spirituals to Swing”. This is more a shuffle boogie version, in the style of Jimmy Reed.

Help Me. I visited the grave of Sonny Boy Williamson in a small lonely churchyard at the edge of a cotton plantation near Tutwiler, Mississippi, close to where W. C. Handy heard his first blues tune in 1903, played by a guitarist using a metal slide. On Sonny Boy’s grave, people had placed mouth organs and bottles of whisky. I had met him in the early 60s. I’ve always loved this harmonica blues based on the Green Onions riff. Sonny Boy (real name Rice Miller) certainly needed help! Maybe not the sort of help that whisky and women had to offer…

Nobody’s Fault but Mine: “I have a Bible in my home: if I don’t read and my soul is lost, nobody’s fault but mine”. Classic 1927 gospel blues by Blind Willie Johnson.

If there is time, Corina will also sing the traditional Appalachian song "Down to the River to Pray" , also known as "Down to the Valley to Pray" or "The Good Old Way" (remember the scene in "O Brother, Where Art Thou"?), an unaccompanied nineteenth century field song/spiritual, said to be sung by slaves.

UPDATE: There was just enough time and Corina won the hearts of the audience with all her songs See review by Corfucius