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Little is known about William "Big Foot" Harris, who recorded a dozen or so songs in the late 1920s, of which this has become the best-known over time:
The greatest covers of this number are all by Rory Gallagher, of which there are many versions on YouTube. Here's one of my favorites, from 1976:
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 CannedHeat version (very indebted to the original), which became a hit in 1968:
Foghat emerged from the British Savoy Brown Blues & Boogie Band, and really made it big in America in the mid-1970s, when they were a staple of stadium rock concerts (and, allegedly, one of the inspirations for the rock satire This is Spinal Tap). Here's a terrific live performance of one of their signature songs, complete with the long Rod Price slide guitar intro (the video quality is uneven, alas):
This was the best Deep Purple line-up, recorded live from a tour in Scandinavia after the Machine Head album: Ritchie Blackmore on guitar, Jon Lord on keyboards, Ian Gillan on vocals.
Recorded in Stockholm, this is a pretty raw version of the blues classic, the one an unknown Jimi Hendrix played just three years before on a club stage in London, leading Eric Clapton to walk off after being upstaged:
Excellent footage of the whole band on this early performance for Beat Club in 1969, before legal threats by the actual CTA forced the band to shorten their name (big mistake by the actual CTA!). Most of the band members had been students at DePaul University in Chicago. Gives a nice sense of how good a guitarist the late Terry Kath was.
Zeppelin manager Peter Grant generally kept Zeppelin off television programs, but this is rare video of a live recording for a Danish radio program of one of Zeppelin's best blues-ripoffs--complete with Jimmy Page breaking out the violin bow:
As long as we're on a Southern Rock theme, this performance of "Free Bird" at the Oakland Colosseum is basically the epitome of 1970s stadium rock. Just a few months later, lead singer Ronnie Van Zandt and guitarist Steve Gaines (the one with the short beard) were killed in a plane crash. Indeed, now the only surviving members of the band from that day are guitarist Gary Rossington (the one playing slide guitar) and drummer Artimus Pyle. (That huge Confederate flag in the background is certainly jarring now, but it generated little controversy back then, although might have something to do with the striking racial composition of the audience!)
Continuing with our new series of live rock 'n' roll video clips, we turn to the Marshall Tucker Band from South Carolina. Never quite as successful as the Allman Brothers or Lynyrd Skynyrd, Tucker still contributed some staples of "Southern rock," including this rousing live performance of "Ramblin," with the late Toy Caldwell on lead guitar.
We'll take a break for a couple of months from our usual "obscure" fare in favor of some great live performances, mostly of non-obscure songs, but hopefully some readers haven't seen some of these clips. We'll start with a gem from the Allman Brothers, from their famous show at the Filmore East in 1971, not long before Duane Allman (on slide guitar) died in a motorcyle accident. And that's Dickey Betts, of course, on lead guitar.
Israeli hard rock and sometimes psychedelic band, active from the mid-1960s into the 1970s, sometimes under the name "The Churchills." This is a representative number from their harder rock phase:
After Mountain, bass player (and record producer) Pappalardi teamed up with the Japanese band formerly known as Blues Creation to record a forgettable album, except for the lead track, which isn't bad:
Part of the British blues explosion in the 1960s, this is far and away their best-known number, and what a great one it is (you'll have it on replay I predict):
Another great number (this from their second album) from the Philadelphia hard rock trio that deserved to be much more successful than, alas, they were:
Cleveland, Ohio rock band active in the 1960s and 1970s (but never made it to the big time), this brilliant cover of the Monkees' hit comes from their debut album:
...in my opinion, anyway. Glad to hear yours in the comments (click on the category, "Great Moments in Obscure Rock 'n' Roll" to see this year's selections from which to choose). When the year started, I was skeptical I would find enough suitable choices, but as it turned out, there were so many good choices, it's hard to settle on just five, so I'm going to list some runners-up too. (By the way, you can find all these and more--and the best from prior years--on Spotify under "Brian Best of Obscure Rock 60s and 70s"; you may need to search "Bleiter" and then scroll through to find mine.)
40 years ago, in my misspent youth, I had planned to be a rock star, as it were. I played a passable rhythm guitar, I sang more in tune than Bob Dylan or Neil Young (not by much), and I wrote lots of songs. I was also fortunate to know a real rock musician, Tommy Williams. Tommy took my simple songs, arranged them, and added lead guitars, bass, keyboards, drums and lead or backing vocals. Some weren't bad, and once we get around to digitizing them, I'll put them online. Unlike me, Tommy has made a real career as a musician, since he is a very good one. Anyway, all this is a prelude to the main point: each Xmas, Tommy and his wife and son, record Xmas versions of well-known rock songs, in this case, Joe Walsh's "Rocky Mountain Way." Tommy is playing all the guitars--do check out his Xmas twist on the famous guitar "talk box" solos.
Not a philosopher, but a famed guitarist from rock's Golden Age (1967-1972), born Leslie Weinstein, a nice Jewish boy from Long Island. Most famously, he played with the band Mountain (which took its name from West's bulk), and then later with Jack Bruce and Corky Laing in a trio. Here's a few numbers, some obscure, some not so much.
Here they are doing their most famous number, "Mississippi Queen," live at Randall's Island, in the East River just off Manhattan in 1970:
American hard rock/heavy metal trio, they were supposed to be the next Black Sabbath, but ended up recording only one album before being dropped by RCA. This is the concluding number from that album:
British hard/progressive rock band active in the early 1970s and produced by Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones. This is probably their best-known number:
Another number from the debut album of this Philadelphia band we featured a few weeks ago, who were, not wrongly, described as the "American Black Sabbath" (albeit not as successful), which one can hear in this song:
British blues rock band active in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this is from their debut album (a cover of the mid-60s number by the Irish band Them):
Bobby Fuller was famous for "I Fought the Law," but I'd never heard his live version of that 60s staple "Misrlou," which sounds more like 1968 acid rock in his rendering:
British hard rock blues band formed in 1968 by two former members of Procol Harum, this song from their second album is a slightly different version of one from their first:
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