BLIND BOY FULLER: COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 5 (1938-1940)
1) Stop Jivin' Me, Mama; 2)
Long Time Trucker; 3) Big House Bound; 4) Flyin' Airplane Blues; 5) Get Your Ya
Yas Out; 6) Jitterbug Rag; 7) Screaming And Crying Blues; 8) Blacksnakin'
Jiver; 9) I Don't Care How Long; 10) You've Got Something There; 11) Baby, Quit
Your Low Down Ways (take 1); 12) Baby, Quit Your Low Down Ways (take 2); 13) It
Doesn't Matter, Baby; 14) Black Bottom Blues; 15) I Crave My Pig Meat; 16) Big
Leg Woman Gets My Pay; 17) I'm A Stranger Here; 18) Red's Got The Piccolo
Blues; 19) I Want Some Of Your Pie; 20) Jivin' Big Bill Blues; 21) Woman, You
Better Wake Up; 22) Step It Up And Go; 23) Worn Out Engine Blues.
This one is going to be very short: although
the fifth volume covers a longer time period than the fourth, it yields even
fewer pretexts to write anything meaningful. Oh yes: this late 1938 session
gave us the title of the best live album by the Rolling Stones — ʽGet Your
Ya-Ya's Outʼ may be just another rewrite of ʽLog Cabin Bluesʼ, but it was well
worth it in the end.
At the other end of the album, ʽStep It Up And
Goʼ is probably the first
recording of this song that actually uses this title, under which it would
later be recorded by plenty of other people (Bob Dylan's version is what comes
to mind first). But we cannot even give Fuller complete credit, since the merry
little jug band dance tune dates back to at least 1932, when it was still
called ʽBottle It Up And Goʼ. Fuller's variant is competent, but that's about
it.
So, instead of trying desperately to write
something about the music on here, let me just throw in a fun fact —
apparently, it turns out that, due to his short prison term for the
wife-shooting «accident», Blind Boy Fuller never made it to the From Spirituals To Swing show that John
Hammond presented in Carnegie Hall. Big Bill Broonzy did, though, and who knows
if that event, which introduced jazz and blues music in an «academic» manner
to «respectable» white audiences, was not partially responsible for future
developments of popular tastes? Imagine music lovers not taking after Big Bill
Broonzy (who flowed straight into Muddy Waters, who flowed straight into everything
else), but after Blind Boy Fuller? The guy missed his little chance at world
domination here: one drunken shot in the leg, and Piedmont blues was never the
same after that...
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