Feb 14 – Port Chester, NY – Capitol Theatre ^
Feb 15 – New York, NY – TERMINAL 5 ^
Feb 28 – Mobile, AL – Soul Kitchen *
Mar 01 – New Orleans, LA – Tipitina’s
Mar 03 – New Orleans, LA – Tipitina’s
Mar 06 – St. Louis, MO – The Pageant “
Mar 08 – Denver, CO – The Fillmore + %
Mar 09 – Aspen, CO – Belly Up %
Mar 10 – Salt Lake City, UT – The Depot %
Mar 11 – Victor, ID – Knotty Pine
Mar 13 – Seattle, WA – Showbox %
Mar 14 – Portland, OR – Crystal Ballroom %
Mar 15 – Petaluma, CA – Mystic Theatre %
Mar 16 – Crystal Bay, NV – Crystal Bay Club %
Mar 18 – Sacramento, CA – Harlow’s
Mar 19 – Solana Beach, CA – Belly Up %
Mar 20 – Los Angeles, CA – El Rey %
Mar 21-22 – San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore %
Mar 26-29 – Las Vegas, NV – Brooklyn Bowl
Apr 02-05 – Las Vegas, NV – Brooklyn Bowl
Apr 09-12 – Las Vegas, NV – Brooklyn Bowl
Apr 25 – New Orleans, LA – Tipitina’s
Apr 27 – New Orleans, LA – Jazz Fest
May 02 – New Orleans, LA – Tipitina’s
May 03 – New Orleans, LA – Sugar Mill @
May 24 – Thornville, OH – Dark Star Jubilee
May 31 – Blackstock, SC – Blackstock Music Festival
Sep 11 – Danville, IL – Phases of the Moon Music & Art Festival
(^) w/ JJ Grey & Mofro
(*) w/ Naughty Professor
(“) w/ The Mike Dillon Band
(+) w/ Robert Randolph & the Family Band
(%) w/ Brushy One String
(@) w/ Thievery Corporation and Rising Appalachia
Extraordinary collection of Southern black gospel 1951-1983
Ernest L. Young’s Excello and Nashboro labels have a creation story that would be tough to duplicated today. Young started as a successful jukebox operator in Nashville before adding a retail store that sold his customers the very records they’d been renting on a nickel-per-play basis. Further capitalizing on these two ventures, Young realized that starting a label and selling his own records would be even more profitable. Recording in a makeshift (and later, a purpose-built) studio in his store, he launched the Nashboro label in mid-1951 and the subsidiary Excello the following year. Excello initially picked up Nashboro’s excess, but became a blues and R&B label in 1955, releasing sides by Lonnie Brooks, Slim Harpo, Lightnin’ Slim and others.
Young’s businesses fed one another, with his retail shop sponsoring radio programs and offering its front window for live broadcasts. The label’s early productions were primitive by modern standards, but stripping down the arrangements to a cappella or voices supported by a simple guitar allowed the testimony to shine. There are splashes of piano, organ and reverb, but even as the productions became more complex over time, the focus always remained on the fervent vocal fire. Nashboro’s acts included soloists, duets and groups singing lead and backing, call-and-response and harmonies, and the label found both artistic and commercial success in all these varied formats. The material includes both gospel standards and newly written songs, each of which provides lasting echoes of the era’s civil rights struggles.
Highlights include the male-female duet testimony of the Consolers “This May Be the Last Time”(the refrain of which was repurposed for the Rolling Stones’ “Last Time”), the CBS Trumpeteers’ soulful “Milky White Way,” the Gospel Five Singers’ torchy “Love Deep Down in Your Heart,” and the pre-teen shout of Robert “Little Sugar” Hightower (of the Hightower Brothers) on “Seat in the Kingdom.” Many of the fifties and early-60s sides share vocal attributes with doo-wop, and the later entries branch into the blues of Sister Emma Thompson’s “You Should Have Been There,” the soul of Rev. Willingham and the Swanee Quintet’s “That’s the Spirit,” and the wild hand-clapping rock ‘n’ soul of Bevins Specials’ “Everybody Ought to Pray.” The productions finally become stereo with Hardie Clifton stirring soul vocal on the Brooklyn Allstars’ ballad, “I Stood on the Banks of Jordan.”
Dot Dash, a Washington D.C. band comprised of ex-members of Julie Ocean, The Saturday People and Youth Brigade is offering up a free track from their latest album Half-Remembered Dream. Listen below, and click through for a free download!
Owen Temple is a singer-songwriter with a sociologist’s eye. His third collaboration with producer Gabriel Rhodes extends a string of albums that looks at people, society and the interrelationship between the two. The triptych began with 2009’s Dollars and Dimes, inspired in part by Joel Garreau’s The Nine Nations of America and his thoughts on the shared beliefs that bind people across geographies. On 2011’s Mountain Home, Temple narrowed his focus to the emotions and situations that frame individuals and create identity. For his latest album, he draws from Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, threading his songs with observations of the things people make, including physical objects, relationships, and as demonstrated by his latest set of songs, art.
The self-defining act of songwriting dovetails neatly with Temple’s stories of people finding their place in the world. His characters build identities around concrete artifacts (“Make Something”), ephemeral accumulations of power (“Big Man”), mythical cities (“Cities Made of Gold”) and the relationships they form with others. Temple layers his creation theme with the metaphorical garden of “Homegrown,” and its suggestion that building something worthwhile takes time and attention. Rebuilding too, as “Johnson Grass” imagines a retired LBJ groping for a new identity. As a thesis statement, the album’s title track suggests that humanity’s most indelible mark is houtis stories, and by obvious association, our songs.
