I was told once that during Lent, you don’t sing songs with the word
hallelujah in them. I had never heard of that tradition, though my church in Atlanta had been observing Lent for a while. But I liked it. It made sense. Lent is a season of intense self-reflection, repentance, fasting, low-key suffering, and lament. Songs about victory could run the risk of sounding impatient, even lazy and unwilling.
The hallelujahs will have to wait, as we have some things to sort out first.
Years ago, our worship band started opening each Sunday of Lent with a blues song: Robert Johnson, Elmore James, Blind Willie McTell, Bessie Jones, Blind Willie Johnson, Eric Clapton, and down to The Black Crowes the real stuff. We called it “Blues for Lent.” These were songs of pain and frustration, songs with very vivid pressure points on the hurt that exists in the world.
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I like the “Bob Dylan period” of Modern Times a lot, I play it often. I love it, one of the great albums from the first ten years of the 2000s.
This is a post where I have “dug” out some cover versions of the songs on the record, I would say that none of them are as good as the originals, but they’re good and they are interesting. Many of the album’s songs have roots in well-known older compositions, though in all cases, Dylan has given the songs new lyrics. Some of the “cover versions” I have found are interpretations of the old traditional songs, it wasn’t easy to compile this cover selection…
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020)
George C. Wolfe,
IN 1929, two years after the setting of
Ma Rainey
’s Black Bottom and about seven months after Rainey, the “Mother of the Blues,” made her last recordings, another stylish Southern blues singer the “Queen” of the genre cut a song with her new husband. On “When the Levee Breaks,” Memphis Minnie looses her guitar on Kansas Joe McCoy, who starts to sing:
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s going to break
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s going to break
And the water gonna come in, have no place to stay