House of Cat

music/art/culture

The Album Leaf: There Is a Wind

The other night I put on a record I hadn’t heard before by a group called the Album Leaf. Glad to be home—out of the rain, and away from the madness of the world—I sat down to give the album, entitled A Chorus of Storytellers, a proper listen.
When it came time to flip the record, [...]

10 Things You Should Know About Mississippi John Hurt

1. He was born in either July of 1893 or March of 1892.
2. He picked up his lifelong love of playing the guitar at age nine.
3. He spent his youth playing old-time finger-picking music for dances.
4. He worked as a farmhand into the 1920s, when he was auditioned and picked up by Okeh Records, who [...]

Son of a Preacher Man

by Cat Johnson
“Son of a Preacher Man,” widely considered one of the greatest singles of all time was first recorded in 1968 by Dusty Springfield and included on the landmark album Dusty in Memphis. Written by John Hurley and Ronnie Wilkins, they originally offered the song to Aretha Franklin, who turned it down. After hearing [...]

Little Miss Dynamite

Before the British Invasion, there was Brenda Lee. After the British Invasion, there was Brenda Lee. Little Miss Dynamite, who signed with Decca as an eleven year old in 1956 and had her first top-ten hit with “Sweet Nothin’s” in 1959 went on to sell over 100 million records worldwide, traversing genres from rockabilly and [...]

Monk and Coltrane at Carnegie Hall

As the story goes, in 2005 while thumbing through tapes in the Library of Congress, Larry Appelbaum discovered some reels labeled “Carnegie Hall Jazz 1957″ with “T. Monk” handwritten on the back.
Finding lost Thelonious Monk recordings would make any day great, but the heart-racing moment came with the realization that the saxophonist on the tapes [...]

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