Remembering BB King (and the blues)

BB King visits Bill Ferris' Harvard class November 1974

On May 14, 2015, BB King left this world of sorrow and pain and — thanks in part to his musical legacy — this world of passion and hope. BB and the blues are featured in Bill Ferris’ 1975 documentary on the ibiblio-hosted Folkstreams.net site:

Give My Poor Heart Ease: Mississippi Delta Bluesmen

Give My Poor Heart Ease is one of a series of films made in Mississippi in the mid 1970s by William Ferris and the Center for Southern Folklore and produced in association with Howard Sayre Weaver. This field work is the basis for Ferris’s 2009 book Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues.

More of BB can be found at the BB King Archive student produced site (also on ibiblio).

To read more about BB, see the Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing Project biography — sourced from the World Heritage Encyclopedia.

Thanks for the Blues, BB.

Now is the Month of Maying

Now is the month of maying,
When merry lads are playing,
Fa la la la la la la la la,
Fa la la la la la lah.
Each with his bonny lass
Upon the greeny grass.

We are reminded that May flowers once brought more that pilgrims by the World Heritage Encyclopedia and Project Gutenberg. “Now is the month of maying is one of the most famous of the English ballets, by Thomas Morley published in 1595. It is based on the canzonet So ben mi ch’a bon tempo used by Orazio Vecchi in his 1590 Selva di varia ricreatione

But since the merry month has taken on a more mechanically challenging meaning. We now break the barley by less personal means.

Mowing machine

And others prefer our barley broken and brewed as sung in “When Jones’ Ale Was New” by Roger McGuinn at the Folk Den:

Come all you honest labouring men that work hard all the day,
And join with me at the Barley Mow to pass an hour away,
Where we can sing and drink and be merry,
And drive away all our cares and worry.

Each May we continue to celebrate “prodigious mowing did we make”