Anita O'Day - Let Me Off Uptown

There's a new documentary out on Ms. O'Day: Anita O'Day - The Life of a Jazz Singer - that is getting good reviews and probably well worth hunting down if you're lucky enough to live somewhere slightly less rural than New Hampshire. The last documentary that played in my home town was Our Friend, the Beaver at the Grange Hall. I also recommend Anita O'Day's gritty, noirish biography, High Times, Hard Times.

Bryant Gumbel: "Your personal experiences include rape, abortion, jail, heroin addiction..."

Anita O'Day: "That's just the way it went down, Bryant."


Here's the trailer for Anita O'Day - The Life of a Jazz Singer

Tommy Makem - Four Green Fields

In August 1969, Makem went to sing at the Free Derry Fleadh, a festival meant to give some hope to the people of a town he loved so well, a town that bore the brunt of the bloodshed and battered heads of the Troubles. I've talked to maybe 20 people from Derry over the years who say that hearing Makem's version of "Four Green Fields" was their last great memory, before the north of Ireland descended into complete madness.

Kevin Cullen - The Boston Globe, August 2, 2007

Full article

Bob Dylan - Spirit on the Water, Bethel Woods, NY

Neither "over the hill" nor "past his prime," as the crowd-pleasing lyrics have it, Dylan in 2007, in full Vincent Price mode.

The fan-shot video is one of the better I've seen, not shaky, complete, and with some great close-ups. Note the (wedding?) band Dylan is wearing on his ring finger, which you can spot when he pulls out his harmonica towards the end of the song. Lots of speculation about that ring, which appeared on Dylan's hand sometime around the 2006 baseball stadium tour.

The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem - When The Ship Comes In

via Bloomberg News:

Aug. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Tommy Makem, the musician, singer and master storyteller who teamed with the Clancy Brothers to popularize traditional Irish folk music around the world, has died. He was 74.

Makem died in New Hampshire yesterday from lung cancer, according to a posting on his Web site.

Playing banjo, tin whistle and singing in a deep baritone, Makem was known as the ``Godfather of Irish music'' for bringing Irish culture to mass audiences. His original songs, such as ``Four Green Fields'' and ``Gentle Annie,'' have become Irish folk music standards.

``He was a great entertainer,'' his lifelong collaborator Liam Clancy told RTE state radio, ``He had a knack of making an audience laugh and cry, holding them in the palm of his hand.''

Working with the Clancy Brothers -- Liam, Tom and Paddy -- Makem shot to fame in the late 1950s and early 1960s, playing to sold-out audiences at New York's Carnegie Hall and London's Royal Albert Hall. They appeared on the ``Ed Sullivan Show,'' ``The Tonight Show'' and every U.S. television network, making them at one time ``the four most famous Irishmen in the world,'' according to Makem's Web site.

A Post From Your Host

We received an email from our ad serving company - Revlayer - yesterday, noting that they've suspended their Beta, pulling the product in for "additional development," and in fact they have even taken their site off-line. So for the immediate future videos on Series of Tubes will be ad-free, although we'll still be showing ads on the right column.
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Personally, out of many ad solutions I've tried and tested, I liked revlayer, which I thought fairly inoffensive. From a technical side, they seemed to have some problems displaying the ads - you'd sometimes see naked code, links wouldn't work properly, and so on. And they definitely need more work on the customer support side. I still have no idea whether I earned any money or not (I suspect not) over the Beta.

But, as the saying goes, it was a Beta. I hope that this isn't dissembling and that they will be back.

Saltwater Music: Del Suggs

Del Suggs was born on the Florida Gulf Coast, and that saltwater connection has influenced his music all his life. Jimmy Buffet meets James Taylor, with maybe a dash of Steve Martin thrown in for laughs, is what you may think if you chance on a Del Suggs show. In this clip, he tells of a character from a bit further west along coastal waters. Bayou Josie is her name.

WFSU outloud: Del Suggs & Friends - Bayou Josie

Chuck Parker, Pete Winter, and Danica Winter are among the friends who sit in on this gig, from the studios of WFSU -TV.

Bob Dylan - I Threw It All Away; Living the Blues; Girl from the North Country

Note that the first few seconds of this 9-minute clip - Johnny Cash's introduction of Dylan - has no audio. Mislabeled on Google Video as simply the duet of Girl from the North Country with Johnny Cash, this is actually Dylan's full May 1969 performance at the legendary Ryman Auditorium in Nashville for The Johnny Cash Show.

As with the One Too Many Mornings clip below, this shows Dylan in full "new" country-western voice that he'd use for Nashville Skyline and for many of the songs on 1970's Self Portrait where the very Hank Snow-like Living the Blues would appear.

Dylan seems very nervous throughout, licking his lips between songs, looking everywhere except at the the audience. Probably not all that surprising as it was only Dylan's second public performance after his 1966 motorcycle crash (in 1968 Dylan had performed at a tribute for Woody Guthrie in New York City, and later in 1969 he would take the stage again for the Isle of Wight Festival). Added to that was the pressure of his performing in front of a Nashville audience that might react poorly and the risk Dylan was taking of alienating his core audience with this radically changed approach to his music.

After the show, a visibly relieved Dylan returned to Johnny Cash's house with a group that included Earl Scruggs, Graham Nash, Nash's then-girlfriend Joni Mitchell, and Kris Kristofferson. Nash recalls Sara Dylan sitting there crying at the drama of the moment.