When Jessie was setting up to play at Crawley Technical College in Sussex on his English tour in the mid-60's, he'd lost his foot operated cymbal in transit. He went off around the back of the college to find a substitute & came back with a coal shovel which he placed to his left on the floor. He then proceeded to take off his left shoe & sock & asked if anyone had a penny, this he put between two toes & started tapping out the beat on the shovel. It was a dream evening of virtuoso one-man-band blues playing that no-one has matched since.
I love how that rig he's got around his neck filters his vocals and puts a wee bit of natural distortion on them. And is that a freaking KAZOO on there alongside the harmonica? Wild, wacky stuff.
Yeah they didn't manufacture slides til the 70s, nor glass cutters in the dollar store lol. So really more guys then we think Were probably using random objects
Well, there were no Dollar Stores back then, but you could certainly buy a glass cutter. You could also cut a length of pipe with a saw. We weren't exactly living in the Stone Age in the seventies!
Would be a perfect song metaphor for "The Rain of Terror" by Frank Manley from Best of the South : from ten years of New stories from the South. The reality we get caught in and the future just keeps rolling on along seems inevitable and can drive us crazy if we are not careful.
@Mark Landgraf, I only recently discovered him, but what I've seen in other places he typically used an old pocket knife as a slide. I can't see it all that well in this video, but I'd say that's what it looks like.
Interesting how close fullers 'john henry' is to Terry and Magee's version, compared to the many other versions around. Also there is a line through to Woodie Guthrie in there too. And many of the musical lines from San Francisco Blues are also used in 'She's no Good Fuller was unique. Thanks for the great posting.
Awesome and amazing! By the way, I have heard bassist Colin Hodgkinson, probably best known for playing with Alvin Lee and Ten Years After, do a solo bass guitar version of "Walking with my Baby down by the San Francisco Bay". You can find it on RU-vid.
The phrasing, the “groove” itself, even the verse structure points squarely back to Jimmie Rodgers....if not as the creator, then certainly the one who brought it to the common consciousness of the music world.
