In summer 2018, I did a series on the blues roots of rock music; as I wrote then: "All the best rock 'n' roll is indebted through and through to the blues music produced by African-Americans, first in the American South in the first half of the 20th-century and then moving a bit north (to cites like Chicago) after WWII." Thanks to the sickness of American apartheid, it largely fell to British and Irish musicians to recapture it and popularize it, although a couple of American bands (e.g., Canned Heat, The Allman Brothers Band) helped. For the rest of the summer, I'll feature some of the classic blues originals, along with some of the more famous covers. We'll start with what was the "Bull-Doze Blues" by Henry Thomas (1874-1930), but became far more famous in the 1960s as "Going Up the Country."
And here's the Canned Heat version (very indebted to the original), which became a hit in 1968:
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