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TAPE: A1210705

[SHOW: 1 A ]

[AIRDTE: 0 7 / 0 5 / 2 1 ]

[AIRTME: 10:00 - 12:00]

[HOST: ]

[STORY: RED, WHITE AND THE ]

[CONTENT: EMILY ATKIN, DANIEL SWAIN, SAMANTHA MONTANO]

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00:00:08 JENN WHITE This is . I'm Jenn White in Washington and today we celebrate Independence Day with a one hour tribute to an original American art form. We call it Red, White and The Blues. Blues music arose from the African American experience in the South. On the farms and in fields, enslaved Black people sang to keep their spirits up, spread the news and sometimes to relay secret messages. In church, they sang gospel music. At work, the blues. Blues music went on to become the basic DNA for , R&B, , rap and most every manner of modern music. On today's program, we'll listen to some blues and learn about this music through the lens of the National Recording Registry at the . The music we're profiling is being preserved for all time in the National Recording Registry because of its historical, cultural or aesthetic importance to our society. There as much a part of our heritage as "God Bless America", "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "When You Wish Upon a Star". 00:01:11 JENN WHITE (CONTINUED) All of which are also in the registry. Now anyone can nominate a recording for the registry. It just has to be at least 10 years old and there has to be an existing copy. Typically the public nominates hundreds of recordings and then a Blue Ribbon panel of experts adds around 150. From that long list, the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, picks 25 recordings to add to the registry.

00:01:36 CARLA HAYDEN When I look at a list and I see Memphis Minnie 1941, the blues. It's called "Me and My Chauffer Blues". It's a way of saying, wow, not only is the title something, but who was Memphis Minnie. So you want to make sure that people are possibly intrigued and want to a little deeper and find out, "Did anybody else record that? And who was Memphis Minnie?"

00:02:05 JENN WHITE Let's dig a little deeper now. Memphis Minnie was born Lizzie Douglas in Algiers, Louisiana in 1897. She started at age 11, ran away from home at 13 and played street corners under the name Kid Douglas. By the end of the 1920s, she was calling herself Memphis Minnie. "Me and My Chauffer Blues" has been recorded over 30 times by everyone from and Nina Simon to and The . One of Memphis Minnie's biggest devotees is singer Maria Maldaur. She remembers visiting Minnie's grave in Mississippi.

00:03:13 MARIA MALDAUR I just felt this awesome soulful presence not just of the spirit of Memphis Minnie surely, but of all the others and all the other people that were such expressive artists. And they were doing it so on the natch. They weren't thinking, "Well, I'm going to become, you know, a blues star and make a million dollars." These are people that were expressing their souls on their back porches and expressing themselves about things that were happening to them very immediately. Her songs are very autobiographical, but at the same time very universal.

00:04:01 JENN WHITE Memphis Minnie was one of the meanest guitar players of her day. She would challenge other players to cutting contests and nearly always won.

00:04:09 The unusual thing about Memphis Minnie was the fact that she stood out as one of the few self-accompanied, independent women in the down home blues business.

00:04:20 JENN WHITE Historian and Author Peter Guralnick. 00:04:22 PETER GURALNICK Yeah, as wrote in his autobiography "Big Bill Blows" and he wrote this with great admiration, "Memphis Minnie played the guitar just like a man." And he describes this cutting contest in which Memphis Mi nnie beats everybody, all the famous blues singers, all the men. All the men because there were no other women involved. Just as in the early days of rock and roll there weren't a lot of early women . And it may have had something to do with the difficulties of travel. It may have been an exclusive organization. But I think more than anything it was just -- it was a very hired life and not many women chose it. But Memphis Minnie did to our great edification.

00:05:01 JENN WHITE Between 1929 and 1941, Minnie recorded over 150 songs many of which have become classics like "Me and My Chauffer", "Bumblebee" and "". One of the lucky to record with Memphis Minnie was Jimmy Rodgers who for years famously played with and .

00:05:22 JIMMY RODGERS Little Walter and I, we made records with her. I enjoyed the old lady. You know, she would tell you what to do and how to do it. And I'd say, "Okay, Minnie, all right." I was young and trying to learn. Greatest day of my life. And play the blues with Memphis Minnie. Yeah.

00:05:40 JENN WHITE Minnie made records into the 1950. In 1960, a stroke put her in a wheelchair, but she never stopped playing guitar. Memphis Minnie died in 1973 at the age of 76. Memphis Minnie and "Me and My Chauffer Blues" recorded in 1941 and added to the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress in 2020. From Memphis we go back in time to where the very first blues record was made. It was 1920 and records were becoming big business in the white world. But at that point no company had ever recorded a blues singer. "Crazy Blues" was the song and Mamie Smith was the artist. The song was entered into the National Recording Registry in 1994 as a tribute to its importance in America culture. To tell the story of "Crazy Blues" we have an archivist.

00:06:58 MICHAEL TAFT My name is Michael Taft. I am the head of the Archive of Folk Culture at the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress.

00:07:05 JENN WHITE An author 00:07:07 LAWRENCE COHN My name is Lawrence Cohn and I'm quite proud of a book I did in 1996 called "Nothing But The Blues: The Music And The Musicians".

00:07:14 JENN WHITE And an activist turned educator.

00:07:17 UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER My name is . I am a Professor of History of Consciousness and Feminist studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. I am also the Author of "Blues Legacies and Black Feminism". Mamie Smith was the first vocalist to record the blues.

00:08:05 MICHAEL TAFT Mamie Smith was rather peculiar. It's funny that she was the first to record this kind of blues because she was not primarily a blues singer. At the age of 10, she was on the stage dancing. And she was a dancer and a singer and an actress and she performed in films in the 30s and 40s. She was all -around entertainer, but I don't think she herself would have called herself necessarily a blues singer in the way that perhaps Ma Rainy or were.

00:08:30 LAWRENCE COHN This people who recorded in the early 20s were working as vaudevillians in various guises as dancers, as comedians, as singers.

00:08:40 ANGELA DAVIS But no Black blues singer had been recorded in 1920. And in a sense it was happenstance that Mamie Smith acquired the opportunity to record "Crazy Blues" earlier in the year. Sophie Tucker had been scheduled for a recording station, but became ill. And managed to persuade to allow Mamie Smith to do the recording session i nstead.

00:09:14 LAWRENCE COHN And Bradford who I got to know when I was a teenager in the 50s, he wrote these songs and he produced them. And he really is the guy that sold the concept to record companies that Black female vaudevillians could translate to blues and that there was money to be made.

00:09:34 MICHAEL TAFT That recording sold really well.

00:09:37 LAWRENCE COHN Right out of the box, I think they sold something like 10,000 recordings the first week.

00:09:42 ANGELA DAVIS Within a month it had sold over 75,000 copies. 00:09:55 MICHAEL TAFT There was a market there that had not been served. And Mamie Smith and her recording was like the opening shot. I think the Black public was ready to start buying records. There was enough of a working class with money that were ready, willing and able to buy recordings that were coming out of their own culture.

00:10:19 ANGELA DAVIS The recording of "Crazy Blues" led the way for the professionalization of Black music for the Black entertainment industry and indeed for the immense popularity of Black music today. So there was a time in the history of this country when white people were able to live and experience what they thought of as American culture without having the slightest idea about the creativity of Black people. And now of course Black music stands in for American musical culture not only within the country, but all over the world.

00:11:28 JENN WHITE Mamie Smith and "Crazy Blues" recorded in New York in 1920. It was the very first recording of a blues musician. The song was entered into the National Recording Registry and will be preserved for all time. We're listening to the sounds of America, recordings selected for the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress. Our salute takes us to and when this hour of Red, White and The Blues continues. I'm Jenn White and you're listening to 1A from WAMU and NPR.

00:12:04 JENN WHITE (CONTINUED) This is 1A. I'm Jenn White and we're celebrating the 4th of July by focusing on an original African American art form, the blues. We're calling this hour Red, White and The Blues and playing songs from the National Recording Registry. Our next musical offering takes us to the epicenter of electrified blues music, Chicago in the 1950s and 60s. On the heels of the Depression and World War II, there was a mass exodus of from the South heading north looking for better working and living conditions. They brought their music. And when they got to the big cities, tradi tional acoustic music was just not loud enough and electrified blues was born. An icon of this new music was Jester Burnett, better known as Howlin' Wolf and his seminole recording of "Smoke Stack Lightening" was chosen for the registry in 2009. To tell us about the song, we'll hear from three people who were important to Howlin' Wolf.

00:13:01 HUBERT SUMLIN My name is Hubert Sumlin. [unintelligible]

00:13:07 BETTY KELLY My name is Betty Kelly. I'm Howlin' Wolf's oldest daughter. 00:13:11 DICK SHURMAN I'm Dick Shurman and I am a producer, journalist, historian. "Smoke Stack Lightening" is indeed a monument of the blues. It shows historical continuity. It shows the power of Howlin' Wolf as an individual. It captures a feeling that summarizes the blues pretty much as well as any recording ever has.

00:13:55 HUBERT SUMLIN "Smoke Stack Lightening" was a number that recording for Sun Label, 's people. He had this old band, Willy Johnson and all of them old guys back there that signed.

00:14:17 DICK SHURMAN Wolf was favorite recording artist of all time and considering that Sam was a discoverer of Elvis Presley, , , , a lot of other great blues artists, that's certainly high praise. He is widely quoted as saying about Wolf that the first time he heard him he said he thought to himself, "This is where the soul of man never dies."

00:14:50 BETTY KELLY He loved his harmonica. I think that harmonica was his outlet. There are moments when I can get a book maybe and curl up and just read it a little bit. Feel better when I come out. I think that harmonica did that for him.

00:15:14 HOWLIN WOLF I had started to make rent, own the plantation. A man come through that picking a guitar called Charlie Patton. And I like the new sounds. So I did always want to play a guitar so I got him to show me a few chords, you know. Every night that I would get off of work. I'd go to his house and he'd learn me how to pick the guitar.

00:15:41 DICK SHURMAN Howlin' Wolf not only was inspired by the music of Charlie Patton, but directly took lessons from him when they were on the same plantation. And "Smoke Stack Lightening" for which will probably always be known is a descendent of a song by Patton called "Moon Going Down".

00:16:10 HUBERT SUMLIN And what happened Wolf was sold to Chess Records by Sun Label. And so when he got to Chess Records we recorded "Smoke Stack Lightening" over again. My original sound of "Smoke Stack Lightening" was the sound that we -- that really I wanted him to have. 00:16:44 DICK SHURMAN "Smoke Stack Lightening" is about a lot of things particularly if you listen to the . First of all part of it does seem to be about the poetic image of the sparks from the cinders coming out of the smoke stack of a locomotive at night, which is a pretty powerful image. But then there's also a verse about, you know, "Tell me where you stayed last night" so I think it's also about lonesomeness and anxiety and a whole lot of mysticism woven in there.

00:17:15 BETTY KELLY I think "Smoke Stack Lightening" is about a disappointment in a love relationship that he was having at the time. And he was trying to get her to understand that they could work it out and they could stay with it. But I think she had been attracted to someone else and it was hurting him.

00:17:36 HOWLIN WOLF And I had a women. She was kind of nice to me and she pulled off and left me and that gave me the blues sure enough. I went to howling like a dog then, you know what I mean.

00:17:50 HUBERT SUMLIN You better believe every song that this guy made is a little bit of what he lived, the way he lived too and what he went through. This is what it's all about, man. And that guy wasn't -- he did not lie. I never known him to tell a lie about anything and God knows anything.

00:18:23 JENN WHITE This is 1A with Red, White and The Blues, profiles of music chosen for the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress. We just heard about Howlin Wolf and "Smoke Stack Lightening" with commentary from Historian Dick Shurman, Wolf's Daughter Betty Kelly, Wolf's Hubert Sumlin and the Howlin' Wolk himself. From Chicago, our musical journey takes us to Detroit. Perhaps best known for soul and R&B, the Motor City has a rich blues tradition personified by . His song "Boogie Chillen" went to number on the R&B chart in 1949 and pretty much shaped all the blues and that followed. To tell us the story of "Boogie Chillen", we have a veteran Author.

00:19:09 PETER GURALNICK I'm Peter Guralnick. I'm a writer. I've written a number of books. But the thing that really got me started is the blues and it's something that I discovered when I was 15 and it has never left me.

00:19:20 JENN WHITE And a veteran blues musician. 00:19:22 CHARLIE MUSSELWHITE My name is Charlie Musselwhite and I first met John Lee Hooker in Chicago probably about '63 I believe. First time I hear "Boogie Chillen" that I remember was there was two radio stations I used to listen to in Memphis. But they came from other places. WLAC out of Nashville and XCRF from Ciudad Acuna, Coahuila, Mexico. And they would play blues and R&B late at night and I could get them on my little radio at home in Memphis. And I remember hearing John Lee late at night coming through the little speaker on my radio. It was just a kind of almost a sinister sound to it. It was so powerful.

00:20:12 PETER GURALNICK John Lee Hooker is one of the giants of contemporary blues. He's one of the giants of the downhome blues that took over after the Second World War and really revolutionized, electrified blues music.

00:20:49 CHARLIE MUSSELWHITE When I first met him in Chicago, he was still living in Detroit. He hadn't moved out to California yet. Some of the places he mentioned like the Henry Swing Club and the areas he talked about were being torn down and the scene in Detroit was disappearing at that time.

00:21:05 PETER GURALNICK John Lee Hooker's roots are definitely in the Delta. It has elements of that kind of modal style where essentially he just stays on the same cord and it's rhythmic to a degree that so much of Mississippi blues is. In the song "Boogie Chillen" you've got a song that's basically it's about life itself. It's a celebration of all things. It's as Howlin' Wolf once sang its nature. I mean, its human nature. The point is you can deny all you want all your elicit desires and all the things, you know, that you may feel in dark of night. But, man, if it's in you it's going to come out. You can't hide.

00:22:07 CHARLIE MUSSELWHITE You know, he was from the point of view of a young man, you know, when he wrote and recorded that tune. He wanted to boogie and he had to and he was feeling his oats and that's what being a young man is all about, you know. 00:22:24 JENN WHITE We heard about John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillen" from Peter Guralnick and Charlie Musselwhite. That song is immortalized in the National Recording Registry, which preserves audio echoes from the past. This is 1A. I'm Jenn White and our Red, White and The Blues salute to African American music continues with a stop in by way of Texas. Aaron T-Bone Walker was born in Lindon, Texas in 1910. T-Bone Walker's technique is considered the gold standard for electric guitarists. And his song "Call it Stormy Monday" has become a classic. To tell the story of "Stormy Monday" we have a blues guitarist.

00:23:04 DUKE ROBILLARD My name is Duke Robillard and I'm a guitar player, singer, and producer.

00:23:10 JENN WHITE The king of blues.

00:23:12 B.B. KING I'm B.B. King. I play the guitar and I call it Lucile. I'm a blues singer, blues musician.

00:23:19 JENN WHITE And T-Bone offspring.

00:23:21 BERNITA RUTH WALKER My name is Bernita Ruth Walker. I am the daughter of Aaron T-Bone Walker Sr. I was born in 1946, the year that he actually wrote "They Call it Stormy Monday". What makes "Stormy Monday" vital today is it's so befitting for many of our lives that we go through. You know, Monday morning, most people don't want to get up to go to work because they've had a great time over the weekend and now they've got to hit that nine to five. And as it progressed, you know, Tuesday is just as bad. Wednesday is worse because that's a hump day and Thursday is oh so sad.

00:24:12 B.B. KING "The eagle flies on Friday" means that he gets paid. 00:24:27 DUKE ROBILLARD And we go out and party on Saturday, you know, which is still a common practice. T-Bone Walker singlehandedly developed the style and way to play blues on electric guitar that was totally different than anything that had done before. He used a lot of double timing in his soloing, which at that time was something that only horn players did. You never heard a guitar player do it. Very unusual and very innovative to be playing actually twice as many notes per beat. He really completely set the foundation for how blues guitar was to be played. If you talk to B.B. King, he'll I'm sure say something very similar to that.

00:25:43 B.B. KING I never heard anyone play it like him or like that before. What makes T-Bone Walker so special? He played his guitar different from anyone else. He didn't play the guitar with the body of the guitar laying against him. He played the guitar with it turned horizontal. He would and it looked so today then, if that's a good word. He was a very handsome looking guy. He looked like an entertainer. He had that stage presence.

00:26:22 BERNITA RUTH WALKER And he would do the splits in time with the music that he playing. And the women would scream and holler and even the men were clapping like "Go Bone, Go Bone". And I would sit there smiling because that was my dad that was doing those great performances.

00:26:38 DUKE ROBILLARD And some of the ideas that he had developed into ideas that were important in the beginning of rock and roll guitar. Chuck Barry just took T-Bone's style and put it to a different beat. So in essence T-Bone was not only the first guitar player, but he was the first electric rock and roll guitar player really. If a young guitar player comes up and he starts learning guitar off a Stevie Vaughn record or just any contemporary guitar player he is still playing a lot of the technique that was invented by T-Bone Walker.

00:27:31 B.B. KING He had a way of bending the notes on his guitar that made it stand out from anybody else I ever heard.

00:27:44 BERNITA RUTH WALKER "They Call it Stormy Monday" is one of those blues standards. At home, I have approximately nine CDs that have maybe 15 versions on each CD by different artists of that song. So it was just something that grabbed them about that song. 00:28:41 DUKE ROBILLARD The guitar chord line is a little guitar ninth cord figure [makes noise], which is -- that was like a unique thing and it became T-Bone's signature is that little type of line. And that chord line I don't know, it seems to have grabbed everybody because everybody plays it with that line in it and it's almost like a law that you have to when you play "Stormy Monday".

00:29:27 JENN WHITE "Call it Stormy Monday" from Aaron T-Bone Walker. And we heard the voices of Bernita Walker, Duke Robillard and B.B. King. It's our 4th of July salute to the sounds of America with music from the National Recording Registry. We call it Red, White and The Blues. I'm Jenn White. We'll add some rhythm to the blues next on 1A from WAMU and NPR.

00:29:56 JENN WHITE (CONTINUED) This is 1A. I'm Jenn White. We call this hour Red, White and The Blues, a celebration of an original African American art form. As the blues migrated from the fields of the South to the cities of the north, the music evolved, morphed and reinvented itself. When blues made it with it became rock and roll. And when blues and gospel music combined, we got , R&B. An epicenter of R&B or was the Stax Record Studio in Memphis. And one of the biggest hits to come out of Stax was 's "". This 1965 classic was entered into the registry in 2017. To start us on the tale of "The Midnight Hour" we have a card carrying blues brother.

00:30:45 Dan Aykroyd, I'm a artist, writer, actor, I guess you could say. You know, I guess you could say. You know, Wilson Pickett was just briefly in 2000. I was Al Wood and he was Wilson Pickett and he was great to work with and he was appreciative of the focus. But what you got with the Wicked Pickett was an edge in music that many of the other artists of the time did not have, kind of a dangerous edge, unpredictable and occasionally bearing weapons. 00:31:21 TONY FLETCHER Wilson was what I would call a natural shouter. He had that foot stomping Baptist Church shouting voice that in his case he could shout and scream in tune. I am Tony Fletcher. I'm an Author and I wrote the biography "In The Midnight Hour: The Life and Soul of Wilson Pickett". He had signed to who had really kind of misjudged where he sat in the market. They were not the right people to be writing for Wilson Pickett. He really needed to be in with really R&B musicians and he probably needed to be back down South. I think both Wilson and who was his point person at Atlantic both were of the same mind for different reasons that what would make sense for Wilson Pickett would be to see if they could get in at the Stax Studios down in Memphis.

00:32:23 Hi there. This is Steve Cropper.

00:32:25 TONY FLETCHER Steve Cropper was the sort of defacto producer for all the sessions at Stax. But he was also a part of the backing band in the studio that backed , that backed Simon Dave, the back to , Wilson Pickett, , all the way through.

00:32:41 STEVE CROPPERT Jerry Wexler had called Jim Stewart who was the president of Stax and told Jim, "We've got this artist we want to bring down and have you record." I didn't know Wilson Pickett at the time, but I worked in a record shop. So we started looking for things that he might have sung on and somewhere somebody came up with a gospel record. And I remember playing the out over and over because he would go into this chant about "I'm going to wait to till the midnight hour. I'm going to see my Jesus in the midnight hour. Wow in the middle night hour."

00:33:07 TONY FLETCHER Wilson didn't just come up with the idea of singing about "In the Midnight Hour". The phrase "the midnight hour" had been around in gospel music. It was a very, very common phrase.

00:33:16 STEVE CROPPERT Jim and I pick up Jerry and Wilson at the airport in Memphis. Go to the hotel, which was that time a Holiday Inn. It's not there anymore at the corner of Poper Avenue and Crosstown. And Jerry said, "Jim and I are going to go eat something and have a meeting. You guys go ahead and get started writing." 00:33:33 WILSON PICKETT When I went down to Memphis, I took or five hit songs down there that I had written. Steve Cropper was a very together guy like he would pitch in. He would jump in there. Suddenly change into some lead doing this way or that way. But he was good at doing that. So he come to my hotel. We put everything there together. Make it right.

00:33:54 STEVE CROPPERT In about I don't know, about two hours later or so, knock on the door. Open it and Jerry says, "How's it going?" So we played him two songs. And he said, "Man, I'm getting out of here. You guys are doing well." He said, "Just keep writing."

00:34:07 TONY FLETCHER They went in the next day and recorded these four songs and one of them, of course, was "In the Midnight Hour".

00:34:34 DAN AKROYD The midnight hour I guess is when a man and a woman are in a room together and it's time to decide whether there's going to be some kind of a consensual interaction.

00:34:42 STEVE CROPPET To me essentially it's a moment of loving. I mean it's really like that dark hour of the night.

00:34:48 UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER Wilson, actually what happens at the midnight hour? What actually goes on once the clock strikes 12?

00:34:55 WILSON PICKETT All sorts of things. You have to get up and take the dog out. I mean anything could happen.

00:35:12 TONY FLETCHER You hear [unintelligible] with the most obvious of baselines. It's really just an arpeggio, the two chords that run through the verse. Yet something in the way that he plays it has made it one of the most idealized baselines that you'd ever come across. Over the top of [unintelligible] arpeggio with the brass dancing all around it is Al Jackson on drums and Steve Cropper really come down together on that two and the four.

00:35:48 STEVE CROPPERT Jerry Wexler was the acting producer because he had brought Wilson down. And he didn't like what I was playing. And he said, "Steve, can you just play straight back beats." 00:35:57 TONY FLETCHER Steve would have had every right to say, "Mr. Wexler, you know, we're the guys making hits here. You haven't delivered a hit for Wilson Pickett. We know what we're doing. Could you kindly leave us alone and we'll get on with what we're doing. But Steve did not say that. He listened to Jerry.

00:36:11 STEVE CROPPERT Some people out there might not know what a back beat is and that's usually what the drummer plays and he usually puts it in R&B on two and four. One, two accent, three and four very heavy. The accent on two and four keeps everybody's little booty moving and that's what we always did.

00:36:28 TONY FLETCHER Which apparently was influenced by Big Johnson at the time and a number one hit called "The Jerk".

00:36:44 STEVE CROPPERT It was like a pull down, put your hands and fists up in the air and kind of pull down towards your belt line. And if you do that on two and four then that's called a jerk.

00:36:52 TONY FLETCHER To emphasize the point apparently, Jerry came out of the control room. This is a guy whose ready well into middle age and so it's like their dad coming out of the control and he starts demonstrating the jerk in the studio looking a little bit like a sort of out of shape middle age boxer in the process.

00:37:23 STEVE CROPPERT We were in a big studio, very big studio and we didn't do anything in those days with headphones. They might have been invented, but we didn't use them. I learned to stay right with the drummer by watching his left hand.

00:37:35 TONY FLETCHER Back in those days this was being recorded all in one go, all in one take live to take the brass sections are not coming afterwards. You had this no overdubs to this. This is the recording, the one take recording. And so you have to imagine eight musicians plus Wilson Pickett in a room with a sloping studio recording live to tune track.

00:37:58 STEVE CROPPERT The horns are vital to these tracks. They produce this fullness and this breadth and width to the music that was kind of missing in rock and roll. 00:38:14 TONY FLETCHER They play in a way that manages to sound both sort of laid back and incredibly urgent at the same time. The brass comes in as if it's almost an afterthought. And yet the more than you listen to that grass, the more you realize it suits the song. And obviously Wilson Pickett's performance is absolutely stellar.

00:39:01 DAN AYKROYD What struck me about seeing him and hearing him was just the full on commitment, the vibrancy and the edge and the danger in his performance, you know, and that wonderful voice he had just at the top of his capabilities. He always pushed it and never held back at all.

00:39:20 JENN WHITE Wilson Pickett and "In the Midnight Hour", one of the songs being preserved in the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress. We also heard from Dan Aykroyd, Steve Cropper, Tony Fletcher and the Wicked Wilson Pickett himself. It's 1A. I'm Jenn White and this July 4th holiday we're presenting some of the blues based music featured in the registry. A salute to Red, White and The Blues. Our final musical offering is another example of how the blues can distort into a completely new form of expression. "?" the debut from took the blues to new heights and knocked the rock world on its ear. The album was inducted into the registry in 2005. To learn more about "Are you experienced?" we talk to a musician.

00:40:12 VERNON REID This is Vernon Reid and I'm a guitarist, songwriter, a composer and a music producer. I've been involved with a wide range of music from world music to to [word?] jazz to metal. And I wouldn't be here if it wasn't Jimi Hendrix.

00:40:28 JENN WHITE A recording engineer.

00:40:30 My name is Eddie Kramer. I was involved in the "Are you experienced?" album as engineer.

00:40:35 JENN WHITE And an archivist. 00:40:36 RUBEN JACKSON I'm Ruben Jackson and I'm an archivist at the National Museum of American History, a Smithsonian Institution. It's still a landmark recording because it is of the tradition, you know, the rock R&B blues, what have you musical tradition. But I think it altered the syntax of the music, if you will, in a way I compare to say James Joyce's "Ulysses". You read this, you read a page or two of "Ulysses" and maybe listen to just "" and you think, "My goodness, what is this?"

00:41:17 EDDIE KRAMER We were experimenting. That was the exciting part was that whatever he did in the studio we had to just keep up and try to figure out how to record it in a halfway decent fashion.

00:41:34 VERNON REID I think Jimi's singing and I think his lyrics have often been given short drift in consideration of his guitar playing because his guitar playing was so overwhelmingly powerful. See there was no dividing line in Hendrix between a song, the improvisation, the singing, it was all one thing.

00:42:09 RUBEN JACKSON I mentioned his interest in science fiction and this guy wrote a lot of poetry and was very influenced by . I've often wondered to what extent Dylan's influence on a piece like "Are you experienced?" Experienced, you know, is he talking about drugs? Is he talking about sex? Is he talking about all the above? And you never know. It's kind of inferred, but then you've got those kind of backwards swirling contributing to this lyrical foundation.

00:42:43 VERNON REID Jimi's backwards guitar was an effect that he rehearsed. Contrary to popular belief I would say Jimi Hendrix was extremely well -prepared. He had a very clear concept of what it would take to come up with the goods. I would give him rough mixes of songs that we had been working on and he would take them home and experiment on his own tape machine. He would but it in his machine and play it backwards and rehearse to it so that by the time he came back to the studio the following day he would have planned out precisely what he was going to play for a solo. And we would turn the tape upside down and he would know precisely where he was by the sound of tape and exactly would stop there, play it from there and record from there to there. And he would say exactly where he wanted to go. And he play the solo. And we'd flip the tape back on the forwards direction and out would come this incredibly, beautiful melodic solo that was perfectly structured from the beginning to the end. 00:44:18 RUBEN JACKSON "Are you experienced?" I think is the groundbreaking album that everybody should listen to first before you get on to the rest of the music that he wrote.

00:44:25 VERNON REID Here's a man who was completely at ease and completely at one with his guitar. This is a milestone much in the same way that any of the great jazz musicians had made classic . I think Jimi had made his first statement.

00:44:57 RUBEN JACKSON I was at a school recently doing some poetry with some fifth graders and a young lady had a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt on. And of course, I had to ask her about this. And she said, "Oh, I just love the music. I just makes me want to go in my room and paint and write things." And, you know, he was someone who painted and wrote. So it's not just old school guys. If a fifth grader can just get kind of wide eyed and excited as this young lady did I thought, well, this guy really had something and still does.

00:45:37 JENN WHITE The story of "Are you experienced?" from the Jimi Hendrix experience, an album being preserved for all-time in the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress. And telling us about the album we had Vernon Reid, Eddie Kramer and Ruben Jackson. If you know of an audio recording, and it doesn't have to be music that you think is important to preserve for generations to come, you can submit it to the recording registry. Email [email protected]. That's [email protected]. Today's producers were Ben Manila and Jennie Cataldo of BNP audio. This program comes to you from WAMU, part of American University in Washington distributed by NPR. I'm Jenn White. Thanks for listening. Happy birthday America. This is 1A.

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