Miz Minka's Musings: Musical Monday: A Yodel

I've always been fascinated by yodelers and accordion players. What can I say? Mom and Dad said I made the crib rattle during The Lawrence Welk Show.

By way of Miz Minka's blog, here's a lady, Lisa Ward-Dillier, who does both at the same time. I can't remember an episode when Myron Floren yodeled. And he was inducted into the International Polka Hall of Fame!

Miz Minka's Musings: Musical Monday: A Yodel#links#links#links#links

"Wunnerful, Wunnerful!"

Sweet Home Chicago

This 12-bar blues standard, which is credited to the legendary Mississippi Delta musician Robert Leroy Johnson by some, is an unofficial Chicago anthem. The Democrats also played it a lot during their 1996 national convention. It has been covered by at least 500 artists including Johnny Otis, Muddy Waters, Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton, Roosevelt "Honeydripper" Sykes and Earl Hooker.

Mr. Johnson never visited Chicago, it is believed. His lyrics differed from the better-known version. The Honeydripper was the first one to record Sweet Home Chicago using the lyrics used in the Blues Brothers cover.

Others claim Johnson borrowed the song from a part-Cherokee blues guitarist, Scrapper Blackwell. Scrapper, who grew up and spent most of his life in Indianapolis, did travel to Chicago and the "level light city", Kokomo, Ind. He recorded Kokomo Blues in the 1928 for Vocation Records. Johnson's version that changed the city to Chicago was also recorded for Vocation nine years later.

Now, Johnson was the guy who was rumored to have sold his soul to the Devil at a Mississippi crossroad. He gets the credit for writing Sweet Home Chicago. The legend died at another Mississippi crossroad in August 1938, possibly from drinking strychnine-laced whiskey.

Blackwell lived on until October 1962 when he was shot and killed during an Indianapolis alley mugging.

Laughter in the Rain

So many songs have been written about the rain. Today's continued soaking reminded me of one from 1974, Neil Sedaka's Laughter in the Rain.

That song features the alto sax work of Jim Horn, perhaps the most recorded sax player in history. So much of his work seasoned the songs of my childhood such as the Fifth Dimension's Up, Up and Away and The Age of Aquarius and Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys. I'd drag my blue Panasonic ball-and-chain radio to bed. I'd stay awake past midnight, when AM radio waves traveled the best, listening to WLS in Chicago via a plastic earplug.

Now that I think back, Jim Horn is probably the primary reason I picked the alto sax out of a vast fifth-grade band line-up. Music is a universal language. Jim Horn's exquisite playing spans the whole range of inflections that cause us to bond emotions and memories with what would otherwise be noise. If the task can't be done with anything from a soprano to bari sax, Mr Horn can switch to an oboe or flute and haunt me just as much. Check out his oboe playing in the The Carpenters classic, For All We Know.

My parents approved my choice because they liked Boots Randolph's Yackety Sax. Mom and Dad bought a "vintage" Vito that probably dated from the late 1940s. It is gold to me still despite its lack of lacquer, countless dings, and green specks. It rests next to a Selmer Mark VI tenor, my parents' Christmas gift to me two years later.

Sedaka and Horn are still amongst the ranks of the hardest-working and not-notorious people in show business. They've been recording, writing, and blessing our culture since the 1950s. I doubt they've seen the dusty roads of the Osage Cuestas. I do, nonetheless, thank them for the magic their music adds as dust turns to mud on this laughably wet day.