Nearly everyone has heard about Woodstock and the US Festival, but the same can’t be said for the Memphis Country Blues Festival. Depending on the year, the annual gathering held in Memphis between 1966 and 1970, was the place to see and hear genre icons. Country-blues guitarists Furry Lewis and Mississippi Fred McDowell, along with blues and R&b character Rufus Thomas, all played there, as did folk and rock guitar heroes Johnny Winter and John Fahey. The Rolling Stones were even invited to appear (more on that later), and some...
- 10/1/2023
- by David Browne
- Rollingstone.com
A music festival, held in 1969, is filmed — bits of it airing on local TV — but then shelved for decades before it’s resurrected for a new film. No, it’s not Summer of Soul. It’s Memphis ’69, a recently completed doc — which starts airing next week — that amounts to the blues equivalent to the lauded, Questlove-directed chronicle of that gathering of soul, R&b, and jazz acts.
In Memphis in late May of that year, just shortly before the Harlem Cultural Festival kicked off in New York City, a...
In Memphis in late May of that year, just shortly before the Harlem Cultural Festival kicked off in New York City, a...
- 7/29/2021
- by David Browne
- Rollingstone.com
Before actually telling you anything about Furry Lewis, it’s probably best to just throw one particular performance at you. This is “When I Lay My Burden Down,” recorded in February 1971. You probably noticed the bizarre way he attacks the guitar neck. I’ve never seen anyone play quite like that. He flutters his fingers along the neck like he’s imitating a butterfly, and doesn’t press down on the strings in a conventional way as often as he waggles his fingers over the strings—sometimes not actually touching them as far as I can tell, just waggling above them—or pinching the strings between thumb and forefinger. I also thought it was weird that he rested his entire arm on the neck for a moment, until we hit the three-minute mark and he started throwing down his elbow, and schooling me on...
- 6/13/2008
- avclub.com
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