This week on Jay Bruder’s Home Town Special

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Jay Bruder’s  big Washington music retrospective set, “R&B in D.C. 1940-1960” has been released by Bear Family Records and is available from their website.  It’s been reviewed in the Washington Post and Washingtonian magazine.  .

Sunday October 24

Friends:

Tonight on The Home Town Special Bill Browning’s Echo Valley Boys get things going with a splash doing “Wash Machine Boogie.” That remined me that old fashioned washing machines used to use clock timers so we follow with Cecil McNabb’s “Clock Tickin’ Rhythm,” and Phil Flowers “Tick Tock.” Hank Williams makes a return appearance with “Fly Trouble” and the sound-a-likes fall in right behind. It’s past time for a little levity. Bob Corley does his best to break the political stalemate, and Homer and Jethro do a surprisingly respectful send up of Paul Williams big dance hit “The Huckle-Buck.” “Little Boy Blue” leads us from rockabilly to bluegrass before it even had a name. Joshua White and his Carolinians demonstrate why he was billed as The Singing Christian. Montana Taylor give us a lesson in Boogie Woogie, before it had that designation with “Detroit Rocks.” And Detroit did rock with The Detroit Count who gives us a tour of Hastings Street. Many of the blues artists who worked Chicago before the Second World War were still alive and well in the 1950s. Len and Phil Chess had the good sense to bring them into the studio to see what they could do. The results were not earth shaking, but the surviving records give us a good sense of how Big Bill Broonzy, Washboard Sam, and Memphis Minnie tried to update their style to fit in with the emerging Chicago electric blues sound. While these greats were making their last stand in Chicago new sounds were taking over Memphis with vocal groups such as The Prisonaires, The Five Tinos, and Hunky Dory’s group. The last, a Memphis DJ with a gospel background, had tracks released by Houston’s Don Robey at Peacock which we hear. Other Memphis DJs including B. B. King and Moohah The Magnificent also recorded great records in the late 1940s and early 1950s. We turn back to Washington, D.C. with two pop/r&b ballads from The Heartbreakers who recorded at RCA Victor under the auspices of Mrs. Lillian Claiborne and her DC Records operation. Jimmy DeBarry and Walter Horton take us out with an ultra-distorted guitar and harmonica instrumental which borrows heavily from an Ivory Joe Hunter tune. And that’s it for tonight! Hope you hear something you enjoy!

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Jay Bruder

Sunday October 17

Friends,

Tonight on The Home Town Special we start off with a little rockabilly from the end of the 1950s which shows the inroads of the music it helped to spawn, rock ‘n’ roll. Many songs have backstories, but the twisted tale behind “Love Is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia has a fascinating Washington connection involving Bo Diddley, his second guitarist, Jody Williams, and young Washingtonian, Billy Stewart. Our Sunday afternoon host, Dick Spottswood asked to hear Orval Prophet’s version of “Molly Darling” and that request is a pleasure to oblige. Too often I only play a few seconds of the closing instrumentals for each hour, so I thought I’d let your hear the entirety of “Dig These Blues” by The Four Clefs. Some might say that in this song they just stung together a bunch of blues cliches. That’s true, but they chose some very tasty ones and the performance became hugely influential. It was repressed many times well into the 1950s. It’s a real oversight that RCA has not reissued it since. We finish the hour with two contrasting versions of “I Got Down On Me Knees and Cried Holy.” The Mellotones take it straight on while Washington’s Progressive Four give it a Jubilee treatment. Before I forget, the closing instrumental is a great banjo and fiddle piece from The Lonesome Pine Fiddlers of West Virginia called “Five String Rag.” Boogies kick off the second hour and that gives us an excuse to revisit the career of Cecil Gant who busted onto the national market in 1944 as “The G.I. Singsation” with a song called “I Wonder.” He first recorded that title for the African-American owned Bronze Record Co. of Los Angeles. After it started selling widely, it was picked up by Gilt-Edge, another independent label, but one with the clout to pull off national distribution. They pushed the record to national hit status. Cecil Gant took a sentimental view of love and romance, Wynonie Harris usually had a more physical approach to the topic which he demonstrates in “Hard Ridin’ Mama.” Not to be outdone Eunice Davis counters with ” I’m A Wild West Woman” and Soldier Boy Houston wraps things up with his “Western Rider Blues.” Houston was very much an enigma until just a few years ago when his social security death index report helped researchers track down his family who reported that he spent most of his working life working on the grounds crew at the Veteran’s Cemetery in Riverside, California -ironically, an easy drive from dozens of blues researchers who would have loved to have captured his story firsthand. Then we get to jumpin’, and jivin’ with some “Cat Music,”, and finish with a new kind of boogie from the stable of artists Sam Phillips built at the Memphis Recording Service as he launched Sun Records in the early 1950s.  So much music. . .hope you hear something you enjoy!

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