VIDEO: Anus horribilis 2020: Noted in passing (Music)

Ed. here. 2020 is almost over, thank God, truly an Annus Horribilis if ever there was one. (I know my Latin but Walt insists on leaving the headline as he wrote it.) We were going to combine Sports and Music in one last segment of our yearend review, but Poor Len Canayen got a bit carried away yesterday, so we had to leave Music for today. 

I don't write much about music and musicians, partly because so much of modern/contemporary "music" is shit. Rock'n'roll, for instance, ceased to exist (IMHO) with the "British invasion" of 1964. So to write about that genre is to look back 60 years or more, which we do today as we note the passing of Richard Wayne Penniman, better known as Little Richard, who took his last bow on 9 May 2020, aged 87. 

Little Richard was the self-proclaimed king of Rock'n'roll. His first big hit, "Tutti Frutti", released in October 1955, was wild gibberish -- almost like a "holy roller" speaking in tongues -- from a voice like we'd never heard before. Was this the future of music? Frank Sinatra, Pat Boone, Bobby Darin and the others suddenly became the past! With a few others – Fats Domino, Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly – Little Richard laid down what rock’n’roll was to be like.

Born in Macon GA 5 December 1932, into a Seventh-day Adventist family,  Little Richard, learned the piano and sang gospel in the local church choir, something I can relate to personally. (I could never figure out why we Catholics couldn't have a few of those jumpy, toe-tappin' tunes.) Kicked out of the family  home at age 13, he performed in medicine shows before hitching to Atlanta, where he signed to RCA Records in 1951.

He didn't develop his own unique style, though, for another four years. His piano work, crucial to his sound, was limited to hammered chords and a kind of tuneless riffing, but with that megaphone voice, falsetto squeal, bursting energy and powerhouse band, his songs -- "Long Tall Sally", "Rip It Up", "Ready Teddy", "Jenny Jenny", "Lucille", "Keep A-knockin'" and many others -- became not just classics but powerful influencers on singers who followed, whether they acknowledged it or not.

In 1986, Little Richard was among the first to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and received a lifetime achievement Grammy in 1993. He needed none of these and the many other awards or hall of fame citations he received to tell him who he was or what he had achieved. He knew that all along. He won't be forgotten.

The highly influential singer-songwriter John Prine, whose career spanned five decades, passed away on 7 April 2020, due to complications from Covid-19.. He was 73. His musical style was a sort of crossover of folk and country, with a bit of rock added in. It was his lyrics, however, which defined him and made him the voice of the baby boom generation.

John Prine wrote about the problems of everyday life, about loneliness, the elderly, victims of the Vietnam war and those abandoned by the American dream. He did so with a blend of poignancy, anger and sudden bursts of humour. So he would sing about an injured soldier leaving Vietnam with a morphine addiction "with a purple heart and a monkey on his back", about Christmas in prison, and a letter to an advice columnist, "Dear Abby, Dear Abby … My fountain pen leaks, my wife hollers at me and my kids are all freaks." 

In 1999 he released In Spite of Ourselves, an album of duets with female country stars including Iris DeMent and Emmylou Harris. You'll find some tracks from that album, along with "Souvenirs" (my favourite), here.

   

John Prine won four Grammy awards, including a lifetime achievement award in 2020. John, if you're reading this from wherever you are, please accept the first Wally ever awarded to a musician. You sang so much of what I wanted to say.