Fortuitously #2

 

I still bumble blindly around on YouTube sporadically, and occasionally take an unexpected turning and strike gold, such as when I discovered a collections of clips of The Feelies performing live at the Peanut Gallery, a bar in their home town of Haledon, New Jersey, on May Day 1983, which sort of blew my mind as it was everything that I had dared hope The Feelies live might be. I wasn’t even aware The Feelies were active in 1983. And yet there they are, immortalised on film, in grainy black and white, performing a special commemorative Crazy Rhythms set which is amazing in so many ways.

Fortuitously #1

 

There’s a lovely line in Chronicles where Bob talks about a three-minute ballad that “made you stand straight up and stay right where you were. It’s like someone had pulled the cord to stop the train.” He wasn’t talking about ‘From the Cradle to the Blues’ by Margaret Lewis, but he could have been. Simultaneously sophisticated and raw, with Margaret’s phrasing a complete joy, if you can say that about a song that has such a bruised, brooding air about it: “It's a long, lonely road to travel and lose.”

‘From the Cradle to the Blues’ first appeared as the flipside of ‘Goin’ to St. Louie’ (“to get lost in a crowd, can't stand this silence, it's too doggone loud”), a 1959 single on the RAM label of Shreveport, Louisiana, run by Mira Smith who appears backing Margaret as Grace Tennessee, playing her electric blues guitar accompaniment for this rockabilly torch song. It is among many numbers composed by Mira with Margaret, something I first heard on a 1995 Ace CD Lonesome Bluebird, and with my limited knowledge of Margaret’s career I assumed it couldn’t be beaten. I was wrong.