Notes

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from the liner notes of It Came From Memphis, Volume 2

1. Good Kid Robert - Come on Down to my House
Recorded on Beale Street1969. Robert Burse and his brother Charlie were essential to the Memphis Jug Band in the 1920s. Part of the jug band's genius is finding instruments where others see none, the trash can being a case in point.

2. Otha Turner - Boogie
Recorded in Tate County, Mississippi, by Luther Dickinson, mid-1990s. This song is a primer on how to create blues.

3. Moloch - Smokestack Lightning
Recorded at the Memphis Country Blues Festival,1969. This is the mammoth sound that caused Iggy Pop fans to riot in New York when Moloch opened the show.

4. Sid Selvidge - By Your Side
Recorded at Ardent (on National)1966. American Sound Studios was not the only place in Memphis churning out the soul pop in the1960s. Courtesty of Ardent Records.

5. Mud Boy and the Neutrons - Let Your Light Shine On Me
This is Jim Dickinson, Lee Baker, Sid Selvidge and Jimmy Crosthwait recorded in 1992. In memory of Lee Baker.

6. Hammie Nixon, Van Zula Hunt and the Beale Street Jug Band - T'aint Nobody's Business
Recorded in Memphis, circa 1980. As Van Zula Hunt progressed into this song, she got more and more horizontal in her chair, somehow having as much fun sitting as she has with her phrasing.

7.Johnny Woods and Bobby Ray Watson - Shake Your Boogie
Recorded by Jim Dickinson in 1972 at Ardent (on Madison). Bobby Ray Watson may be the great untold story of Memphis in the late 1960s and 1970s.

8. Phineas Newborn Orchestra - Calvin's Boogie
Recorded by the band at the Flamingo Room on Beale Street circa1950. In which the cleanest band in town, Memphis' first family of jazz, gets down and dirty. The band cut these acetates around the time they were backing B.B. King on his early sessions. Calvin remains a premiere jazz musician, but this track reveals his blues roots--and his unbounded energy.

9. Tav Falco's Unapproachable Panther Burns - Train Kept A' Rolling
Recorded at WHBQ-TV at around 9 a.m., circa 1979. Then there was the morning the Panther Burns serenaded the king and queen of Cotton Carnival, live on Memphis television.

10. B.B. Cunningham - Trip to Bandstand
Recorded at Pepper/Tanner studios in 1959. This was the first song B.B. wrote and recorded. The style worked for him later when, with the Hombres, when he cut "Let It All Hang Out." Today he tours with Jerry Lee lewis.

11. Jerry Lawler - Memphis, Tennessee
Recorded at Sam Phillips Recording Service, 1975. Professional wrestling meets "Like Flies On Sherbet."

12. Jim Dickinson and the New Beale Street Sheiks - You'll Do It All the Time
Recorded at Sam Phillips Recording Service, in 1964. Bill Black, Elvis' original bassist, was calling people down to the studio when this was recorded, because he'd never seen anything like it before.

13. Soldiers of The Cross - Going Down Slow
Recorded at the Memphis Country Blues Festival,1969. A supergroup of Memphis white blues players gets together for a little jamming. (After Bobby Ray Watson, James Hooker Brown may be the second greatest untold Memphis story.)

14. Band of Ones - Family Values
Recorded at the P&H Café, 1991. Randall Lyon: The Pope Of Little Rock. Guru Biloxi: obscurantist exceptionale.

15. Lawson and Four More - Back For More
Recorded at Ardent (Grandview), circa1964. The original Kinks-like version of this song remains unreleased

16. Insect Trust - Special Rider
Recorded at the Memphis Country Blues Festival,1969. If Skip James ever read William Burroughs, this band would have been the soundtrack.

17. Bootleggers Quartet - Bottle Up and Go
Recorded at the bootlegger's house in Fayette County, Tennessee, 1971. White lightning, like good music, needs no aging nor ever grows old.

The second in a sparkling series of audio collage/documentaries focusing on the Delta blues, It Came from Memphis, Vol. 2 is a brilliantly conceived and executed exploration into the form. Produced (directed would be a more accurate term) by Robert Gordon, this release is very similar to a modern version of the famous Alan Lomax-produced filed recordings from pre-and post-World War II. The overall primitive and primeval form of the blues comes across on all of the cuts, from the unadorned, downright dirty acoustic "Boogie" by Othar Turner to Moloch's devastating version of "Smokestack Lightning."

Recording the blues at its source with conceivably purposefully primitive equipment, Gordon succeeds in giving the listener a virtual aural, cinematic tour of the genre as an art form in itself. The artists on the record are little-known outside of their hometown, yet the power and dynamic emotive quality of such bigger names as Waters, Burnett, Hooker, and King resides in virtually all of the cuts. The album also shows the listener how the blues influences other genres, specifically the Motown drive of "By Your Side." One of several oddball highlights here is also the scratchy 78-rpm transcription disc of "Shake Your Boogie" by Johnny Woods and Bobby Ray Watson, which, as an instrumental, is as funky as it gets. Even the surface noise sounds cool. Tav Falco's reading of "Train Kept a Rollin'" sounds eerily like an early Velvet Underground rehearsal tape. In the end, you not only get a lot of great, unknown blues music here, but you also get an education. Simply brilliant.