mick laBriola

Edward James “Son” House Jr. (March 21, 1902 – October 19, 1988) was an American Delta bluessinger and guitarist, noted for his highly emotional style of singing and slide guitar playing.

After years of hostility to secular music, as a preacher and for a few years also working as a church pastor, he turned to blues performance at the age of 25. He quickly developed a unique style by applying the rhythmic drive, vocal power and emotional intensity of his preaching to the newly learned idiom. In a short career interrupted by a spell in Parchman Farm penitentiary, he developed his musicianship to the point that Charley Patton, the foremost blues artist of the Mississippi Delta region, invited him to share engagements and to accompany him to a 1930 recording session for Paramount Records.

Issued at the start of the Great Depression, the records did not sell and did not lead to national recognition. Locally, House remained popular, and in the 1930s, together with Patton’s associate Willie Brown, he was the leading musician of Coahoma County. There he was a formative influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. In 1941 and 1942, House and the members of his band were recorded by Alan Lomax and John W. Work for the Library of Congress and Fisk University. The following year, he left the Delta for Rochester, New York, and gave up music.

In 1964, Alan Wilson, co-founder of the band Canned Heat, found Son and had him listen to his old recordings as Son had lost his way. He encouraged him to find his way back to the music and from this collaboration, Father of Folk Blues was born. Wilson even played second guitar on “Empire State Express” and the harp on ”Levee Camp Moan”. Son’s manager Dick Waterman said,” Al Wilson helped Son House find Son House”. He relearned his repertoire and established a career as an entertainer, performing for young, mostly white audiences in coffeehouses, at folk festivals and on concert tours during the American folk music revival, billed as a “folk blues” singer. He recorded several albums and some informally taped concerts have also been issued as albums. In 2017, his single “Preachin’ the Blues” was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.

Harold Mabern Jr. (March 20, 1936 – September 17, 2019) was an American jazz pianist and composer, principally in the hard bop, post-bop, and soul jazz fields. He is described in The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings as “one of the great post-bop pianists”.

Mabern was born in Memphis, Tennessee on March 20, 1936. He initially started learning drums before switching to learning piano. He had access to a piano from his teens, after his father, who worked in a lumber yard, saved to buy him one. Mabern learned by watching and emulating pianists Charles Thomas and Phineas Newborn Jr. Mabern attended Douglass High School, before transferring to Manassas High School; he played with saxophonists Frank Strozier, George Coleman and trumpeter Booker Little at this time, but was most influenced by Newborn, Jr. In 1954, after graduating, Mabern moved to Chicago, intending to attend the American Conservatory of Music. He was unable to afford to attend music college because of a change in his parents’ financial circumstances, but had private lessons there for six months and developed his reading ability by playing with trombonist Morris Ellis’ big band. He also developed by listening to Ahmad Jamal and others in clubs, and “playing and practicing 12 hours a day” for the next five years, but he remained self-taught as a pianist. Mabern went on to play with Walter Perkins‘ MJT + 3 and others in Chicago.

Mabern learned orchestration techniques from bassist Bill Lee, and comping and chord voicing from pianists Chris Anderson and Billy Wallace.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe (born Rosetta Nubin, March 20, 1915 – October 9, 1973) was an American singer, songwriter and guitarist. She gained popularity in the 1930s and 1940s with her gospel recordings, characterized by a unique mixture of spiritual lyrics and electric guitar. She was the first great recording star of gospel music, and was among the first gospel musicians to appeal to rhythm and blues and rock and rollaudiences, later being referred to as “the original soul sister” and “the Godmother of rock and roll “She influenced early rock-and-roll musicians including Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and also later guitarists, such as Eric Clapton.

Tharpe was a pioneer in her guitar technique; she was among the first popular recording artists to use heavy distortion on her electric guitar, opening the way to the rise of electric blues. Her guitar-playing technique had a profound influence on the development of British blues in the 1960s. Her European tour with Muddy Waters in 1964, with a stop in Manchester on May 7, is cited by British guitarists such as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Keith Richards.

Willing to cross the line between sacred and secular by performing her music of “light” in the “darkness” of nightclubs and concert halls with big bands behind her, Tharpe pushed spiritual music into the mainstream and helped pioneer the rise of pop-gospel, beginning in 1938 with the recording “Rock Me” and with her 1939 hit “This Train“. Her unique music left a lasting mark on more conventional gospel artists such as Ira Tucker Sr., of the Dixie Hummingbirds. While controversial among conservative religious groups due to her forays into the pop world, she never left gospel music.

Tharpe’s 1944 release “Down by the Riverside” was selected for the National Recording Registry of the U.S. Library of Congress in 2004, which noted that it “captures her spirited guitar playing and unique vocal style, demonstrating clearly her influence on early rhythm-and-blues performers” and cited her influence on “many gospel, jazz, and rock artists”. (“Down by the Riverside” was recorded by Tharpe on December 2, 1948, in New York City, and issued as Decca single 48106). Her 1945 hit “Strange Things Happening Every Day“, recorded in late 1944, featured Tharpe’s vocals and resonator guitar, with Sammy Price(piano), bass and drums. It was the first gospel record to cross over, hitting no. 2 on the Billboard “race records” chart, the term then used for what later became the R&B chart, in April 1945. The recording has been cited as a precursor of rock and roll, and alternatively has been called the first rock and roll record. In May 2018, Tharpe was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an Early Influence.

This gauzy-looking celestial body is UGC 5829, an irregular galaxy that lies about 30 million light-years away. Despite there not being many observations of this relatively faint galaxy, it has the distinction of having a descriptive soubriquet: the Spider Galaxy. Perhaps the distorted galactic arms with their glowing, star-forming tips bring to mind the clawed legs of an arachnid. Somewhat confusingly, there is another, very similarly nicknamed but otherwise entirely distinct, galaxy known as the Spiderweb Galaxy. This galaxy has also been more extensively imaged (notably by Hubble), despite the fact that it lies about 300 times further from Earth than the Spider Galaxy does.

Fortunately, correct galaxy identification does not depend on casual given names. Rather, known galaxies are recorded in at least one catalogue — and often in several — such as the Uppsala General Catalogue of Galaxies, which gives the Spider Galaxy its more formal title of UGC 5829. This same galaxy also has several different designations in various other catalogues: it is, for example, LEDA 31923 in the Lyon-Meudon Extragalactic Database; MCG+06-24-006 in the Morphological Catalogue of Galaxies; and SDSS J104242.78+342657.3 in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Catalogue. The Spiderweb Galaxy isn’t recorded in all of the same catalogues — each is necessarily limited in scope — but it is included in the LEDA catalogue as LEDA 2826829. It is evidently simpler to not conflate the dull but distinct names LEDA 31923 and LEDA 2826829, than the fun but easily confused Spider and Spiderweb!