I've been listening to a CD over and over again for the past few days; it is "Dark was the Night" by Blind Willie Johnson. Every time I listen to it I like it a little better -- and I did not dislike it to begin with! If anything could persuade me to believe, it would be good gospel music like this. Last week I bought a portable CD player, which I had been meaning to do for a while now. My thinking is that I will listen to music on the train to and from work and that, with repetition, I will come to a deeper understanding of the songs. This is certainly happening with Johnson -- I had thought his songs were quite simple, with few lyrics and not much happening on guitar, and that his main attribute was his awesome voice; but in reality there is quite a bit of musical complexity under the surface, and the lyrics have some pretty insightful bits that you don't catch until the third or fourth repetition. Jim came over last night and we played blues for a couple of hours. He is really into Leo Kottke and is showing me some neat stuff. We played a really long set of songs in D (I was using dropped-D tuning and he was using open-D), jamming from one into the next; I discovered that it is hugely confusing to jam from "C.C. Rider" into "Stagger Lee" (and probably vice versa) because the songs are quite similar in certain ways -- in mid-verse I will forget which one I am playing and slip into the other one.
posted morning of Wednesday, October 15th, 2003
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