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By Larry, March 9, 2017 2:12 pm

Funky16Corners: Hello L.A. Bye Bye Birmingham

Bobbie Gentry – Okalona River Bottom Band (Capitol)
Billy Lee Riley – Mississippi Delta (Mojo)
Artie Christopher – Stoned Soul (Atlantic)
Cher – I Walk On Gilded Splinters (Atco)
Buzz Clifford – Hawg Frog (Dot)
Joe South – Motherless Children (Capitol)
Kin Vassy – Hello LA Bye Bye Birmingham (UNI)
Lonnie Mack – Too Much Trouble (Elektra)
Nat Stuckey – Clean Up Your Own Backyard (RCA)
Roy Head – Don’t Want To Make It Too Funky (In the Beginning) (ABC/Dunhill)
Area Code 615 – Stone Fox Chase (Polydor)
John Randolph Marr – Sarah (WB)
Skip Easterling – Hoochie Coochie Man (Instant)
Tony Joe White – Whompt Out On You (Monument)
Kelly Gordon – If That Don’t Get It It Ain’t There (Capitol)
Charlie McCoy – Minor Miner (Monument)

Listen/Download – Funky16Corners – F16C: Hello L.A. Bye Bye Birmingham MP3

Greetings all.

The end of the week is here and I will take this opportunity to remind you that the Funky16Corners Radio Show hits the airwaves of the interwebs each and every Friday with the best in soul, funk, jazz and rare groove, all on original vinyl. You can subscribe to the show as a podcast in iTunes, listen on your mobile device via the Stitcher and TuneIn apps, check it out on Mixcloud, or grab yourself an MP3 right here at Funky16Corners.com

Also, my (roughly) monthly jawn at WFMU’s Rock’n’Soul Ichiban stream – Testify! –  commences this very Sunday morning, March 12th at 11AM, and if you dig the sounds you hear both here and over at Iron Leg, it would behoove you to tune in your internet radiola (just got to the WFMU page and click on the Ichiban Stream) and dig it.

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That all said, what you see before you is the result of one of a number of ongoing obsessions (and musical workaholism) that finally reached a tipping point this past week when I got my hands on a record I’d been wanting for a long time (and bookends the original Honky Style mix which is ten years old this year) .

That record – Buzz Clifford’s ‘Hawg Frog’ – is in many ways the ne plus ultra of swamp funk sides.

The mix gets its title from a song that’s kind of a cornerstone of the sound, written by Mac Davis and Delaney Bramlett and recorded by no less than three artists in the mix (though I only included my fave, by Kin Vassy).

Swamp funk, country funk, white Southern soul, call it what you want – and really, it deserves a bunch of different names because as a style it’s kind of diffuse, with a bunch of things, funk, rock, soul, country, blues, psychedelia and R&B all intersecting in a variety of ways – the only real common denominator (at least in this mix) being the caucasianosity of the perpetrators.

You get some of the bigger names associated with the stylistic miasma, like Tony Joe White, Joe South and Bobbie Gentry, some of the lesser known folks, like Kin Vassy, Billy Lee Riley and John Randolph Marr, background characters like Kelly Gordon, Nashville heads like Charlie McCoy, Area Code 615 and Nat Stuckey and even a couple of unexpected names like Cher, Lonnie Mack and Buzz Clifford.

It’s sometimes funky (with a couple of very tasty drum breaks), usually twangy, often soulful, and with the soul of a mud-caked cottonmouth snake hidden out in the wheel well of bus taking Highway 55 from Memphis to New Orleans.

So pull down the ones and zeroes, and dig it.

I’ll see you all on Monday.

Keep the faith

Larry

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Also, the brand new Funky16Corners ‘Keep Calm and Stay Funky’ stickers have arrived! The stickers are 4″ x 3″ and printed on high quality, glossy stock. They are $2.00 each, with free shipping in the US ($2.00 per order shipping outside of the US). Click here to go to the ordering page.

PS Head over to Iron Leg too.

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By Larry, April 7, 2015 4:08 pm

Area Code 615

Listen/Download – Area Code 615 – Stone Fox Chase

Greetings all.

As I was strolling through the back woods of the mirrors of my memory of the alleys of my mind (otherwise known as the to-be-blogged folder on the hard drive) I decided to drop something a little different today.

Area Code 615 was an aggregation of Nashville session heavies that got together and recorded two albums in 1969 and 1970.

Though their albums are both worth picking up for their groovy mixture country, rock and a little bit of soul, they were met with commercial indifference at the time of release.

Fortunately for the group, their legacy was cemented when today’s selection, ‘Stone Fox Chase’ became the theme for the UK music show ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’, and was later sampled by Mantronix and Royal House.

The sample-age has everything to do with the wild drums and percussion on the track, which is – for a large part of its playing time – basically a duel between various drums and Charlie McCoy’s harmonica. There’s a wicked breakdown, with congas, drum set and cowbell at around 46 seconds that is positively hypnotic, and then another, featuring kalimba and what sound like a table at 1:42 that is equally groovy.

Thanks in large part to ‘Stone Fox Chase’, the ‘Trip In the Country’ LP is a tough pull, not crazy expensive, but hard to find. Their first (self-titled) LP is also pretty cool.

I hope you dig the tune, and I’ll see you on Friday.

Keep the faith

Larry

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Also, the brand new Funky16Corners ‘Keep Calm and Stay Funky’ stickers have arrived! The stickers are 4″ x 3″ and printed on high quality, glossy stock. They are $2.00 each, with free shipping in the US ($2.00 per order shipping outside of the US). Click here to go to the ordering page.

Also, make sure that you check out the links below to the Be The Match Foundation and POAC (click on the logos for more info).

PS Head over to Iron Leg too.

Comments (2)

By Larry, September 29, 2013 1:50 pm

Kin Vassy (top) and at left with the First Edition

John Randolph Marr

Listen/Download Kin Vassy – Hello L.A. Bye Bye Birmingham

Listen/Download The First Edition – Hello L.A. Bye Bye Birmingham (Live)

Listen/Download John Randolph Marr – Hello L.A. Bye Bye Birmingham

Greetings all

I have something very special for you today.

A short time ago I met up with someone on Facebook with whom I had a mutual friend.

While perusing his timeline I saw that he had posted a video by the First Edition doing a song I’d never heard before called ‘Hello LA Bye Bye Birmingham’.

If the name of that group is vaguely familiar, it was the spawning ground of none other than Kenny Rogers, and a band that had a couple of major hits, including their 1968 cover of Mickey Newbury’s ‘I Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)’, which is featured prominently in ‘The Big Lebowski’.

Anyway…I gave the aforementioned video a spin and was blown away.

First off, while I own (and dig) a couple of First Edition singles, I had never heard them do anything like ‘Hello LA…’, and the live performance – from their early 70s TV variety show (included below) – is absolutely smoking.

The real revelation was the lead singer of the song, a cat named Kin Vassy.

Vassy (Kin was a truncated version of his middle name, Kindred) was the singer/guitarist with the First Edition, replacing Mike Settle in 1969.

He had been a member of the 60s folk group the Back Porch Majority, and had recorded a couple of solo singles before hooking up (and apparently during his tenure) with the First Edition.

One of these is today’s selection, ‘Hello LA Bye Bye Birmingham’.

When I started digging around I was surprised that I hadn’t encountered the song before.

Co-written by Mac Davis and Delaney Bramlett, it was recorded by a wide variety of artists, including Blue Cheer, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band,  Juicy Lucy, and even Nancy Sinatra (you can seek out many of these on YouTube).

The popularity of the song doesn’t surprise me, since it has the kind of funky framework that works well at just about any speed, as well as a fantastic lyric about a cat that bags his home turf and goes on the road to seek success as a songwriter.

Though Mac Davis did record it. I haven’t been able to nail down who did the original version, since most of the ones I’ve found seem to pop up around the same time.

One other excellent version of the song (also included here) was recorded in 1969 by John Randolph Marr. It is in fact his version that was recently comped by Light In the Attic on their excellent ‘Country Funk’ collection, which brings me to the point I’ve been wanting to make.

There was something in the air (and the recording studios) of the South in the mid-to-late 60s and onward wherein (mostly) white musicians with a taste for gospel, R&B, soul and funk began to stir up a (if you’ll forgive the term) gumbo of those sounds with country, swamp pop and rock.

The most well-known and successful proponents of this sound were guys like Tony Joe White and Joe South, but you can also include folks like Bobbie Gentry and Davis in the mix as well.

While there’s a temptation to affix the term ‘blue eyed soul’ to some of these sounds, I think what we’re dealing with is something else entirely.

There were plenty of white soul singers working during this time period, including guys like Wayne Cochran and Roy Head, but they were by and large working solely in black styles.

The country funkers (for lack of a better term) were coming into their sound by creating an organic mixture of white and black styles, in the end creating something less than a movement but still a recognizable sound.

Little of the music made by these artists is out and out funk, but it is undeniably funky.

Kin Vassy’s studio version of ‘Hello LA Bye Bye Birmingham’ works a mid-tempo funky beat, adding in twangy lead guitar (dobro, too) and Vassy’s hard-edged, soulful vocals. Hearing Vassy sing, with the First Edition and solo was something of a revelation. He was a mighty singer, and in an age where every leather-lunged, longhaired shouter was trying to approximate Wilson Pickett (who would have done a spectacular version of this song), Vassy was able to soar as well as work the quiet passages.

The First Edition manages (surprisingly enough) to toughen the song up even more. Vassy is wailing and drummer Mickey Jones dials up the funk a bit.

I decided to include John Randolph Marr’s take on the song for contrast. Though he takes things a slightly slower pace, the drums and bass are killing it, and Marr had cool, whiskey-tinged voice (I hear a bit of David Clayton Thomas in there). The rest of the album – co-produced by Harry Nilsson under the aegis of his Nilsson House Productions – is an odd mix of country soul and chamber pop.

Interestingly enough, after the dissolution of the First Edition, Kin Vassy spent a short time recording and touring with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. He’s featured on the ‘Overnight Sensation’ LP.

He went on to work as a session singer/musician, eventually settling in Nashville and having some success as a performer and songwriter.

Sadly, Kin Vassy succumbed to cancer in 1994 at the age of 50.

I hope you dig the sounds, and I’ll see you all on Wednesday.

Keep the faith

Larry

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Also, the brand new Funky16Corners ‘Keep Calm and Stay Funky’ stickers have arrived!

The stickers are 4″ x 3″ and printed on high quality, glossy stock.

They are $2.00 each, with free shipping in the US ($2.00 per order shipping outside of the US).

Click here to go to the ordering page.
Also, make sure that you check out the links below to the Be The Match Foundation and POAC (click on the logos for more info).

PS Head over to Iron Leg too.