[gcruse]

Just to add, BTW, I played in a band from 1962 until 1966. The oldies we did were mostly C&W, like Hank Williams. The blues that was requested was redone versions by Chuck Berry and early rock and roll. No one ever requested, to my memory, anything earlier than the 1950s, with the exception of C&W.

[discostu]

A lot of it probably depended on where you were, in Chicago the old blues stuff was still pretty popular, but Phil Chess owned a lot of that music and owned a radio station so it could have been manufactured popularity. Also there's the mentality, I remember an interview with Keith Richards (The Stones actually did a lot of Chuck Berry covers in the early years) where he said they were really scared to be putting that stuff on an album because they didn't think it sounded half as good as Chuck and they didn't want to piss him off. So I kind of wonder who was doing these numbers for fun but never gave them to the fans.

[archy]

Just to add, BTW, I played in a band from 1962 until 1966. The oldies we did were mostly C&W, like Hank Williams. The blues that was requested was redone versions by Chuck Berry and early rock and roll. No one ever requested, to my memory, anything earlier than the 1950s, with the exception of C&W.

That's around the time when I was playing drums, sometimes in a housecat band, other times on the road or as a fill-in at union gigs. But we worked a lot of VFW and Legion clubs where WWII and Korean War vets would ask for songs from that era, sometimes recalling a really special girl who was right alongside them- sometimes there are happy endings; not always, and not often enough.

But I can still handle the lyrics to At Sundown and a lot of old Kay Kaiser tunes. And I've worked with a couple of vocalists who could really belt out the standards.

Rock's not bad, not bad at all. But it's not all there is, either. And it borrows from the best, when it's at its best.

-archy-/-