The Mitchells were cleaning out the house because after 35 years they were moving.  We all know what one can accumulate during that amount of time. George was surprised when came across a folder of negatives:

What’s this?  R.L. Burnside on a tractor with a bunch of his kids? right after I met him? I don’t even remember taking that. And this?! Rosa Lee Hill and Jessie Mae Hemphill dancing? Where are they anyway? At Fred McDowell’s? And there’s Fred, leaning over Othar Turner, who’s playing the guitar, showing his some chords or something.  I don’t remember that.   And here are so many shots I took at what is now called the North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic-the first time it was ever photographed by a white person.  I didn’t know I took so many!

Mitchell hadn’t even looked at these negatives in 40 years since he chose photographs for his book Blow My Blues Away and for album covers. In 1967 George and Cathy Mitchell spent the summer in Mississippi and 13 days of the trip were spent in the hill country with some of the finest musicians from the area. Mitchell was welcomed into the homes of many of the musicians and was able to spend time with them and as well as their family and friends.  He went to dinner in their homes, rent parties, and fife and drum picnics with the musicians posing for portraits and telling him stories. This book, Mississippi Hill Country Blues 1967, documents this time.

I really, really, like this book.  My husband and I love music, especially Hill Country Blues.  In fact, when we married in June of 2009, part of our honeymoon was spent at the North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic in Potts Camp, MS.   The festival line up always includes the descendants, friends, and disciples of most of the elder statesmen of MS Hill Country Blues.  R.L. Burnside’s, Junior Kimbrough’s, and Othar Turner’s families are always well represented.  It is really one of the most fun weekends of the summer in Mississippi.

Above right: Sharde Thomas, granddaughter of Othar Turner, at the 2013 Picnic.

George Mitchell will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, August 21 at 5:00 to sign and he will tell us a little something around 5:30.  We can sit around with some cold beers and talk the blues!

Here is the late great R. L. Burnside performing Poor Black Mattie in 1984.

Peppermint Twist: The Mob, the Music, and the Most Famous Dance Club of the 60s

(St. Martin’s Press, November 2012)

by John Johnson, Jr. and Joel Selvin with Dick Cami

*     *     *

At a 1962 sixth-grade dance at the Riverside Park Clubhouse, I remember being 12 and trying to twist myself into being cool. I wasn’t alone. All my buddies and wanna-be girlfriends (the era of dog tags) were part of a national phenomenon, a craze that lit up all of America. The twist became a major catalyst to the sexual liberation of the ’60s.

The twist taught all of white America to loosen up, to shake your bootie. For once the girls did not have to follow their partners. Roots were planted for the women’s movement and the sexual liberation to come. The twist became a land mark in American music.

Ground zero for the “Twist Atomic Bomb” was the Peppermint Lounge, the center of its universe. The Peppermint Twist Lounge laid the blueprint for future night clubs. It was the first famous rock-n-roll club. Twisting waitresses were the prototypes of the 60s Go-Go Girls, who in white boots, pony tails and skimpy attire, were suspended in cages over the dance floor moving in the flashing strobe lights.

Johnny Otis discovered Hank Ballard and his gang The Midnighters (famous for “Work with Me Annie . . . give me all my meat”). In 1958, Ballard took his twist to the King record studio using a Jimmy Reed shuffle feel, and birthed his tune. King Records decided that a young chicken plucker named Ernest Evans should record Hank’s song. That young singer, Ernest, who needed a star’s name, sang a great Fats Domino impression. So his name was changed to Chubby Checker. The rest is music history.

Dick Clark dug the Twist and used his American Bandstand to fuel the fire of Chubby’s craze. “Just pretend you are wiping your bottom with a towel and putting a cigarette out with both feet.” His record zoomed to maximum popularity.

Joe Dee and The Starlighters became The Peppermint Twist lounge house band. They hit it big with the Peppermint Twist. The Starlighters packed-house-jive was fueled by the Peppermint Twisters which led to rail dancing and eventually to the Go-Go Girls at L.A.’s Whiskey A Go-Go.

Driven by the success in New York City, Peppermint Lounge Miami was next. Dick Cami brought his amazing success formula to the heart of the Chitlin’ Circuit. Miami Lounge became stops for Sam and Dave, The Coasters and other black entertainers.

Celebrities from JFK to the Beatles, Frank Sinatra toting along his rat pack, Capote, Lenny Bruce, and many more all wanted to have fun under the candy cane ceiling. It was the coolest scene in the country. To say the Peppermint Lounge was ground breaking barely touches the influence of  this landmark in American culture. The twist loosened up the 50s and especially us white folks.

Although the music itself is reason enough to read John Johnson’s Peppermint Twist, you’ll be fascinated by cultural, historical, and business escapades. The cultural phenomenon that rose out of The Peppermint Lounge was never meant to happen. The lounge was actually created to be a front for the mob, place to hide their wheeling and dealing. This part of the story is also told in detail and makes this era’s tale Godfatheresque.

I’ve shared a few tidbits of info I gathered from this fine book. Treat yourself to Dick’s story, pull out your 45s and enjoy twisting the night away.

David Byrne is a founding member of Talking Heads.  He has won Grammy, Oscar, and Golden Globe awards.  He has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  He has written books.  Now he has written  a book about music.  I for one think he is qualified.  

How Music Works is David Byrne’s buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about. Equal parts historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, Byrne draws on his own work over the years with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and his myriad collaborators – along with the journeys to Wagnerian opera houses, African villages, and anywhere music exists – to show that music-making is not just the act of a solitary composer in a studio, but rather a logical, populist, and beautiful result of cultural circumstance.  A brainy irresistible adventure, How Music Works is an impassioned argument about music’s liberating, life-affirming power.

It seems to me, Byrne has written the book for music nerds who don’t play music, or get to tour, or get to record on a grand standard.  He discusses everything from digital and analog recording to business and finance to public image.  There’s a good chance I would be writing about this book regardless, but I would like to point out that it is a McSweeney’s book.  Lacking a dust jacket like McSweeney’s are wont to do, it has a lovely white squishy cover with simple black lettering.  The formatting is pleasing.  Pictures are scattered on pages, the colors vibrant.  The chapter and contents text is color coded.  For real book lovers, it is very pleasing.

It’s great timing for this cool music book from McSweeney’s, fitting right in to our neat display!

Here are a couple other new books from the music section.

Is he Jumpin’ Jack flash? A Street Fighting Man?  A Man of Wealth and Taste?  All this, it turns out, and far more.  By any definition, Mick Jaggeris a force of nature, a complete original – and undeniably one of the dominant cultural figures of our time.   Swaggering, strutting, sometimes elusive, always spellbinding, he grabbed us by our collective throat a half century ago – unlike so many of his gifted peers – never let go.

For decades, Mick has jealously guarded his many shocking secrets – until now.  As the Rolling Stones mark their 50th anniversary, journalist and New York Times bestselling author Christopher Anderson tears the mask from rock’s most complex and enigmatic icon in a no-holds-barred biography as impossible to ignore as Jagger himself

Based on interviews with friends, family members, fellow music legends, and industry insiders – as well as wives and legions of lovers – MICK sheds new light on a man whose very name defines an era and candidly reveals:

 

The Man Who Sold the World is a critical study of David Bowie’s most inventive and influential decade, from his first hit, “Space Oddity,” in 1969, to the release of the LP Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in 1980.  Viewing the artist through the lens of his music and his many guises, the acclaimed journalist Peter Doggett offers a detailed analysis – musical, lyrical, conceptual, social – of every song Bowie wrote and recorded during that period, as well as brilliant exploration of the development of a performer who profoundly affected popular music and the idea of stardom itself.

Dissecting close to 250 songs, Doggett traces the major themes that inspired and shaped Bowie’s career, from his flirtations with fascist imagery and infatuation with the occult to his pioneering creation of his alter-ego self in the character of Ziggy Stardust.  What emerges is an illuminating account of how Bowie escaped his working-class London background to become a global phenomenon.  The Man Who Sold the World lays bare the evolution of Bowie’s various personas and unrivaled career of innovation as a musician, singer, composer, lyricist, actor, and conceptual artist.  It is a fan’s ultimate resource – the most rigorous and insightful assessment to date of Bowie’s artistic achievement during this crucial period.

by Simon