(Listen to the interview here.)
"I've
been around it all my life," Calvin Cooke said in a phone interview
when asked how he learned to play steel guitar.
He grew up immersed in a Pentecostal culture, where he heard bands in church playing lap-steel guitar, lead guitar, and drums. Starting on regular guitar at an early age, Calvin's hands were too small to go around the instrument's neck, so he played it on his lap like a steel guitar, using the back of a knife for a slide. "Then when my mother realized I really wasn't going to play the lead guitar, she went to the pawn shop and got me an old steel guitar ... and she started teaching me by ear. ... That was back in the '50s. I got better and better, and then my cousin learned the lead guitar and we would play together" in church.
It
started innocently enough. I asked the blues-rock guitarist, singer,
and songwriter Popa Chubby about his recorded output, by his count 15
or so proper albums in the past 15 years.
he
Chicago-based octet has been around since 1985, performing original
music composed by group director and saxophonist Edward Wilkerson.
The
psychedelic conspirators at Melted Mailbox Records have the lysergic
solution, looking to use your tone arm's needle instead of a
syringe to trip your light fantastic. Later this month the
wax-friendly label will issue the first limited-edition 12-inch
single in its new Melted Mailbox Vinyl Club, a bi-monthly program
that for $70 could be the best pen pal an experimental- music
aficionado could ever have.
First
you hear an old-timey banjo, then a voice like early Dylan, but soon a rousing
chorus, full Americana, kicks in: drums, twin fiddles, and horns that sound
like Van Morrison wrote the charts. That's "Old Dan Tucker," the opening cut on
Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, a
multi-layered tribute not just to Pete Seeger but to "roots" music in general.
