Tonight’s selections from Mississippi bluesman/songster Scott Dunbar’s (b. 1904, d. 1994) only LP, From Lake Mary, first released in 1970.
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Who Been Foolin’ You? [1970]
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Scott Dunbar: born 1904, son of an ex-slave, on Deer Park Plantation between the Mississippi and Lake Mary (an eleven mile cut-off arm of the River) west of Woodville and south of Natchez, Mississippi. He made a guitar out of a "cigar box and a broomstick and some stream wire" when he was eight. When he was ten he acquired a real guitar and began teaching himself to play.
Today Scott Dunbar is a fisherman and guide on Lake Mary, father of six, and resident blues singer of Woodville and rural Wilkinson County, Mississippi. There everybody knows old Scott. We hope this record will make him known to a wider audience.
Scott's music is not polished, and it was not developed for the concert hall or recording studio. He taught himself to play accompanying the old people on the plantation; many of his songs he learned there as a child. He does not know the names of any of the chords he uses because he cannot read music; he tunes the guitar differently for different songs. His playing is strong and loud, and he keeps time with a stomping boot heel; this is an adaptation to a lifetime of playing not so much to or for as with among riotous, noisy audiences with unamplified instruments and voice. In addition the vast repertoire of traditional songs Scott grew up with, he has "made up" a score or so, and learned many more "off the graftofome" during the twenties, thirties and forties. Since he cannot read, he has to keep his songs entirely in his head. — Karl Michael Wolfe, From Lake Mary liner notes
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Forty-Four Blues [1970]
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As a guide, Mr. Dunbar would take groups out hunting and/or fishing on Lake Mary during the day. At night he would play and sing songs around the campfire. If he were alive today he could charge big bucks for that experience. As it was, he eked out a living as a camp guide, supplemented by hunting and fishing.
Some quotes from Robert Nicholson’s Mississippi: The Blues Today! book.
'The water used to come up so high I could step out of bed into the water,’ he remembered. ‘I been fishing since I was a little boy, ten years old. I was a champion at fishing with two hooks. I once caught a white catfish so big you couldn’t pick him up. You gotta stand on the bank and throw the hook into the current. I could swim a mile and I bet old Daddy Austin, an old one-eyed fellow, $100 that I could do it. I tread water like I’m walking, if you stop treading water your nose go under and you strangled by water. I grabbed a alligator gar between my legs and he pulled me so fast my back was up in the air. That gar carried me so fast like an airplane, I thought that gar was going to get me, but I won that $100!’ — Scott Dunbar
Maybe, maybe not? Still, great story. Now, a more serious one...
It was not all parties and drinking. The more worldly problems of society did impinge and Scott had cause to sing the blues when, as he told us, a local white man, a warden on the lake, took to ‘visiting’ his first wife; ‘He broke us up, so I got rid of her (left her) — me and her couldn’t get along. I took my Army gun and ran him out of my house. I said, “If you’re looking for trouble you better turn around and go”. I clicked that gun and he ran!’ This took place in the pre-civil rights era when a black man could fall foul of the law or get strung up by a lynch mob just because he didn’t ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ to white folks.
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Blue Yodel [1970]
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WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Benedict Cumberbatch, Kevin Garnett, the War on Drugs
Jimmy Fallon: Taylor Swift, Colin Quinn, Sam Fender
Stephen Colbert: Kenneth Branagh, Ellie Kemper
Seth Meyers: Taylor Swift, Aisling Bea, Elmo Lovano
James Corden: Andrew Garfield, Jamie Dornan, Laurie Kilmartin
Trevor Noah: Will Smith
SPOILER WARNING
A late night gathering for non serious palaver that does not speak of that night’s show. Posting a spoiler will get you brollywhacked. You don’t want that to happen to you. It's a fate worse than a fate worse than death.
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Jeb Loy Nichols :: As The Rain [1997]
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LAST WEEK'S POLL: CLASSIC GAME
Backgammon 22% 4 votes
Checkers 17% 3 votes
Chess 44% 8 votes
Dominoes 6% 1 vote
Mahjong 6% 1 vote
Othello 0% 0 votes
Other (Cribbage) 6% 1 vote
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A WAFB reporter's earnest attempt to interview the eccentric delta blues musician Scott Dunbar, on his front porch in Lake Mary, Mississippi. … this is a recording from 1977, in which a Baton Rouge, Louisiana news reporter from WAFB-TV attempts to interview Scott at his Lake Mary home. The strange little noises here are the sound of the video camera starting up between takes. — YouTube
Doesn’t have complete songs. It’s clearly a “hey play a little something for the lead in/lead out”, “different camera angle”, “now the interview” and what have you. Despite being raw footage, it’s an interesting video nonetheless. Not a lot of Scott Dunbar video footage out there (not online anyway).
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Scott Dunbar :: WFAB [1977]
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^..^ KITTIES ^..^
Scott Dunbar :: From Lake Mary (full album on YT, if you need to kill an hour, there are worse ways)