The same can seem true to me of those people from the old Greenwich Village folk world. When those liner notes were written, guys like McTell and all the people on the Anthology of American Folk Music probably seemed like they came from another century, and I’ve heard it said that most of the people hanging around the Folklore Center in the early 1960s never stopped to think that any of them, let alone most of them, might still be alive. The place seemed like a relic from another time – from the “Old, Weird America.” Only it was still here. Now and then someone at the hospital would put in an order without giving a phone number or specifying which building they were in, which led to some adventures in a grim complex of cheerless, largely abandoned buildings once known as the Georgia Lunatic Asylum. At the time, I was delivering pizza in Milledgeville, Georgia, and the hospital where he’d breathed his last was part of my route. I also enjoyed knowing what they didn’t: that he’d passed away in the late ‘50s. I found it terribly amusing that they’d put out an album without knowing if the artist was dead or not. In it, that gave a brief biography of McTell, then noted that they weren’t really sure, but it “seemed likely” that he was now dead. Twenty years or so ago, I bought a Blind Willie McTell CD that reproduced the liner notes from a vinyl edition that had come out in the ‘60s or ‘70s. And the same is true for me, even though I wasn’t there in ‘62 or ‘74 at all. Maybe it always did when American Graffiti came out plenty of critics noted that 1962 seemed like far, far longer than twelve years ago. It seems as though ’63 was a whole lot further in the past. It’s strange, but finding a Dylan setlist from a long-lost gig in 1963 seems like it would be infinitely harder than finding one from, say, 1974. Adam’s popped up here a couple times, writing about shows in 1984, 1999, and 2001, but today he goes way further back to explore a forgotten 1963 Gaslight Café show he found buried in the Village Voice archives. Today’s newsletter is a guest entry from Adam Selzer. We are so fortunate that this album is available.Town Hall 1963, shortly after when Dylan might have popped up at the Gaslight Nevertheless, when Son House is singing and playing on this kind of form, there is nothing else whatever that merits your attention, for however long the song lasts. Through sheer emotional intensity he transports himself and his listeners back in time to a juke-joint in the Mississippi Delta,' but that's a romantic avoidance of the gulf between Son House's life experiences and those of his new audience. Some of the guitar accompanied spirituals start out a little tentatively, perhaps reflecting House's lifelong unease about the claims of religion on him, but he soon gets into them, and the blues songs are mostly done with the single-minded commitment. ![]() Even now, shorn of the visual element, and without the excitement of witnessing history come unexpectedly to life, it's still pretty astonishing listening. ![]() ![]() ![]() In 1965, even for those dedicated enthusiasts who knew Son's early recordings, the coffee house engagement that this album preserves must have been an utterly remarkable experience. This album probably preserves Son House s New York debut, a little less than six months after he'd been located in Rochester, NY. It feels like an important bit of living history, and behind every tortured, exhausted note you can almost hear the ghost of Son House in his fiery prime. Like you don't want to be caught by a Baptist preacher trying to sneak out on the sermon, it's nearly impossible not to listen to this set clear through, once it begins. The versions here of "Empire State Express" and "Death Letter Blues" are startling in their intensity. Despite his age, he was still capable of generating a facsimile of the old roar from his Paramount recordings, on occasion, as this set recorded at Gaslight Café in New York in 1965 shows. Son House's rediscovery in 1964 led to some interesting sessions for Columbia Records, and a handful of live recordings from his time on the folk and blues coffee house circuit have surfaced.
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