Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2004 2:45 pm
I'll occasionally play "How I got Over" by Mahalia Jackson. More for blues than lindy though.
in VanCan but on-line she hangs out on lindyhopper.ca - I don't think she reads this board that much. Bet you could get a good thread on Gospel music started over there.......Jake wrote:Where's Lucy Falkner? She could tell us a thing or two about Gospel....
There's more great stuff about "The Blue Devils and the Holy Ghost" in Stomping the Blues, I highly recommend it. (Thanks Rayned for doing so yourself)Albert Murray wrote:In the old days to play church music as dance music use to be condemned as a sacrilege by church elders and dance-hall patrons alike. There were some exceptions, of course, and some very notable ones at that. There were the now classic renditions of The Saints and Bye and Bye, for example, by none other than Louis Armstrong himself. But Armstrong, it must be remembered, besides being a genius (to whom nothing is sacred) was also a product of the highly unconventional religious attitude that the existential bodaciousness of New Orleans postcemetery music expresses. Even so, Armstrong almost always legitimized the iconoclasm of his secular use of sacred music with an unmistakable element of parody. Which many outsiders to the downhome church idiom seem to ignore, but which to insiders signals that Armstrong the musician, who sometimes also plays the role of Satchmo the Jester, has now donned the mask of Reverend Dippermouth the Montebank and is by way of conducting a mock or jivetime church service, so no matter how worked up the musicans become, the deportment and the dance movements of the audience should be governed by the sipirit of caricature...
Thus Armstrong's use of church music in secular situations was not performed to stimulate the usual dance-hall bumps and grinds and the same spirit of parody holds true for the mock sermons of Louis Jordan. But such is not always the case with Ray Charles. When he bootlegs This Little Light of Mine. I'm Goin Let it Shine into his dance-hall version, This Little Girl of Mine, the assumption seems to be that the sacrilege can be nullified by sentimentality; but the effect of doing ballroom and honky-tonk steps to such music would have once struck people of both branches of the idiom as being infinitely more offensive than parody. By comparison, using the name of the Lord in vain would probably have been considered a relatively minor trespass. There is, after all, a world of difference between the way you clap your hands and pat your feet in church and the way people snap their fingers in a ballroom, even when the rhythm, tempo, and even the beat are essentially the same. Once you become a member of the church it is as if you are forbidden to make certain movements; they constitute a violation of a body that has been consecrated to God.
You can't lindy to that. Maybe balboa. Besides, it's rock and roll.julius wrote:jesus is just all right with me.
OK, Tina, I am about to mention Robbie Robertson, that ought to make you happy.BigCash wrote:See if you a can get your hands on a CD by the Zion Harmonizers, (local to New Orleans).
Lots of good stuff.
try www.louisianamusicfactory.com
Yes, I am pretty sure you will love that album.gatorgal wrote:
Believe it or not, I haven't heard "Storyville", so now I need to.
Tina