Ooh, this stuff is home, the old stuff, the best stuff. Right?
I needed to remind myself what a proper shuffle feels like. Something you hear and don’t hear unless you’ve been listening for a very long time. These are some of the songs on which I suckled, the origins of my relationship with music courtesy of my dad’s singles collection which disappeared in the mists of time or during a move, perhaps.
A lot of this old stuff is covered often but doesn’t groove in the right way. All you rock n’ rollers, listen well and learn.
Here’s Clarence Frogman Henry with a very tight number – Ain’t got no home.
Jesse Hill’s Ooh Poo Pah Doo has a beautiful lilt to it thanks to an upfront tambourine and loose drummer.
And on Ernie K Doe’s Mother In Law there is a lovely “In between the cracks” (as Stanton Moore calls it) shuffle which is a bugger to master. In one of my favourite moments from a drum video, the great Levon Helm attempts to demonstrate the feel but it doesn’t quite work, “It doesn’t seem to want to come very easy right now…”. (On Levon Helm Teaches Classic Rock, Country & Blues Drumming.)