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TweedBlog: the Tangleweed blog
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The blog was started by the Chicago-based acoustic Americana group Tangleweed to document their activities as working musicians. It has since expanded its mission to help engender greater interest and understanding of American vernacular music. The blog i
Recent Posts Tagged With 'audio'
Cherokee Shuffle live at Fitzgerald’s
This is the maiden voyage of our version of the warhorse fiddle tune Cherokee Shuffle, from last week’s show at Fitzgerald’s in Berwyn. You can download the whole show at Archive.org. Download audio file (tangleweed_-_cherokee_shuffle_-2...
Hot 78rpm action with the Sons of the Pioneers
There’s a fellow on YouTube by the name of 78Man, who has posted over 800 videos of 78rpm records playing. The result is strangely compelling — like the yule log, but with better music. One of the more appealing sides offered is the Sons ...
Jimmie Rodgers singing Sleep Baby Sleep
This is the track that launched a career, and a career that helped launch an industry. It was recorded in Bristol, Tennessee, on August 4, 1927 for the Victor label. Though it was only a modest success, it marked the beginning of one of the most illu...
Fiddlin’ Frank Nelson playing And the Cat Came Back
I listened to this expecting to hear the song Riley Puckett sang so well, and was surprised to hear this very nice fiddle instrumental instead. Surprised, especially, in that I had never heard of Fiddlin’ Frank Nelson. A quick check of Tony Rus...
Fiddlin’ Powers playing Cluck Old Hen
Fiddlin’ Powers was a John Cowan Powers, from Russell County, Virginia. His recording career encompasses 33 sides for the Victor, Edison, and OKeh labels, though 14 of those seem to be unissued. This is a 1925 Edison recording, and he is backed...
Chicago Bluegrass Festival Recording
A solid recording of the recent Chicago Bluegrass Festival in Evanston, IL is available for free bit-torrent download at bt.etree.org: http://bt.etree.org/details.php?id=524105 Here’s a little sample, our four-man, banjo-less version of the ...
South Australia, live at the Old Town School
Both our of sets from our January 17th shows at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago are available for download at archive.org. Here’s a sample track from the second set, our performance of South Australia, from the Old Town School of F...
Ginseng Blues, live at the Old Town School
As we ready ourselves to play two shows with Jerry Douglas at the Old Town School of Folk Music next Saturday, here’s a wee snippet from a previous performance there. The tune is Ginseng Blues, from Where You Been So Long, and the recording is ...
New MP3 download from Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals
There’s a new downloadable track from Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals on our music page for your downloading pleasure. It’s called ‘Pick Poor Robin Clean’, an old raggy blues tune that we like a lot. It’s also ...
TweedRadio IV: new MP3 stream
Here’s another handy condensed stream of some of the MP3 files that’ve been posted to this site over the past few months. They should play in the Flash dealie below. If you want to know more about the songs or find download links, visit the links...
A little bit of Summertime in the dead of winter
This Boxing Day finds Chicago encased in ice, so here’s a little bit of Summertime for you all. This comes from our first appearance at Martyr’s in Chicago, in December of 2004, about a month after we recorded our first CD, Just a Spoonfu...
Send me dead flowers in the morning
Here’s a live interpretation of the Rolling Stones classic, “Dead Flowers,” from our record release show at The Hideout last month. It’s faster and spunkier than the version on Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals, largel...
How can a poor man stand such times and live?
Blind Alfred Reed recorded this in New York City, just weeks after the 1929 stock market crash. His recording career began two years earlier in Bristol Tennessee, discovered in the same series of sessions that produced the first recordings by Jimmie ...
More Merry Christmas, from the Kennett Brothers (repost)
Today’s post is more reposty goodness for the holiday season. Enjoy Here’s another song from the Kennett Brothers’ long out of print and now ridiculously pricey Xmas CD, Santa is Real. This time, it’s the Kennett’s perfo...
You Don’t Know My Mind
Bob Dunn is rightly revered as the Ur source of Western Swing steel guitar, owing to his work with Milton Brown’s Musical Brownines in Ft. Worth in the mid 1930a. Dunn cut his first sides with Brown in Chicago, 1935, and cut dozens more with th...
Merry Christmas from the Kennett Brothers (repost)
This is a repost of a post I wrote two years ago. Enjoy, while I take the rest of the day off. Santa is Real, the Christmas record my old band the Kennett Brothers put together, is long out-of-print, and, thanks to the efforts of obsessive Wilco comp...
Listen to the Mockingbird live @ The Hideout
Here’s a sample track from Sunday’s record release show @ The Hideout, an accelerated rendition of our new CD’s closing track, Listen to the Mockingbird. Download audio file (tangleweed2008-11-16t15_64kb.mp3) You can download the wh...
Hideout CD Release Show recording
Our friend Joe Steffen recorded our live performance of “Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals” at the Hideout this past Sunday and posted it to Archive.org for your listening pleasure. You can access the show for streaming or downloa...
John Hardy was a desperate little man
The song John Hardy has long been a staple of the bluegrass canon. Tony Russell’s Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921-1942; lists seven prewar recordings by five different performers: Eva Davis: April, 1924 Ernest Stoneman: August, 1925...
TweedRadio III: new MP3 stream
Here’s another handy condensed stream of some of the MP3 files that’ve been posted to this site over the past few months. They should play in the Flash dealie below. If you want to know more about the songs or find download links, visit t...
California, live from Knoxville
Here’s a quick excerpt from our August 15th appearance on WDVX’s Blue Plate Special. The song is ‘California’, which will be on our next CD, Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals. The picture at left is Paul and me with th...
Tangleweed’s WDVX appearance available for download
Tangleweed’s August 15th appearance on WDVX’s Blue Plate Special is available for download on our music page. It’s five songs, recorded live in Knoxville in front of a studio audience. The sound quality is quite good. Matt, the hous...
The Takeup Medley live at the Abbey Pub
We played a show at the Abbey Pub a few months back, opening for Hot Buttered Rum (nice folks, they). Our friend Brian taped both band’s sets, and they’re available for download at Archive.org. Here’s a tune from midway through our ...
With a Bottle in My Hand, Live at the Ark
This popped up on my iPod this morning, a live recording from June, 2006, at the Ark in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was shortly before our second CD, Where You Been So Long, came out, and we were playing our first real out-of-town shows. The Ark was a g...
Bo Carter singing Corrine Corrina
This is, as far as I know, the first recording of this tune, which would become a standard. It’s been recorded by Milton Brown, Bob Wills, Tampa Red, Cab Calloway, Bob Dyan, ad nauseum, ad infinitum. There’s some nice mandolin on this tra...
The Down Home Boys singing Original Stack O’Lee Blues
…Of course, the word ‘Original’ in the title more or less ensures that it’s not the original, but what the heck. Originality notwithstanding, this is the rarest of the rare. There is only one known copy of this recording, and ...
Ernest Thompson singing Are You from Dixie
This 1924 session for Columbia is among the earlier examples of rural vernacular song on a commercial record. The song is not, as one might suspect, a minstrel song, but rather a Tin Pan Alley tune by George Cobb and Jack Yellen that passed into the ...
The Sweet Brothers and Ernest Stoneman singing I Got a Bulldog
This appealing side was cut on July 10, 1928 in Richmond, Indiana, for the Gennett label. It was paired with a tune from a session five days earlier (’Somebody’s Waiting for Me’) on Gennett 6620. The personnel: Herbert Sweet: fiddl...
Weems String Band playing Greenback Dollar
This side, recorded in Memphis in December, 1927, represents one half of the total recorded output of Weems String Band. It’s a pity, too, because it’s a rather extraordinary record. With more weemses than one could shake a stick at. The ...
Gene Autry singing Atlanta Bound
Before he was a singing cowboy, Gene Autry was a Jimmie Rodgers imitator, and a good one. His earliest recordings include several titles from the Rodgers canon, as well as new songs in Rodgers’ style, delivered in a vocal style remarkably simil...
