jackie washington
简介
by Bruce EderJackie Washington has had such a long career, and in so many musical idioms, that it's not surprising that he reached his eighties as a fairly enigmatic figure. Across 50 years, he's crossed paths professionally with everyone from Duke Ellington, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee to Bob Dylan. Born Jackie Washington Landron in 1919 to a family of West Indian and Puerto Rican descent in Hamilton, Ontario, he worked at various times under both names, performing music as Jackie Washington, and as Jackie Ladron when he worked as an actor, his second career. He grew up in Hamilton's sizable black community, and was performing music from age five. He was later a member of the Washington Brothers -- consisting of Jackie and his siblings Ormsby, Harold, and Doc -- whose sound was heavily influenced by that of the Mills Brothers during their eight years together through the end of the 1930s. Washington left music as a profession during the 1940s, though by the end of the decade he was working as a disc jockey, and was singing in nightclubs during the 1950s. In the early '60s he made the leap into a new musical idiom when he became part of the folk revival. He sang blues, which was a short jump to folk music, and with his strong singing and guitar skills, and as a black Canadian, Washington was able to fill the role of a down-north folk-bluesman, a kind of Canadian Josh White. He was signed to Vanguard Records in the early '60s, and began performing extensively in the United States, especially in New York's Greenwich Village at venues such as Gerdes' Folk City and other friendly havens for the music. One of the songs in his repertory was a version of "Nottamun Town," a mountain song recorded and written by Jean Ritchie that he adapted musically to a minor key into his own style, with a droning sound on the guitar. Among the audience members who heard him do this song was Bob Dylan, who asked to hear it several times, according to Washington in the Eric Von Schmidt book Baby Let Me Follow You Down. A while later, Dylan's "Masters of War," re-creating Washington's music from his version of "Nottamun Town," was released on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, the album that established the latter's primacy in the contemporary folk music landscape. Washington talked of suing but evidently never did. He later took a savage swipe at Dylan's sound and his opportunistic streak, however, on "Long Black Cadillac" -- which sounded like a parody of "Like a Rolling Stone," in an electric arrangement by Felix Pappalardi, featuring the Youngbloods -- which was released in May 1967 on his LP Morning Song, his fourth for Vanguard. In the interim, he'd also released the live album Jackie Washington at Club 47 and the soul-flavored single "Why Don't They Let Me Be," all attracting relatively little attention. The unfortunate part about Washington's recording career -- for Washington -- was that Vanguard never really pushed his recordings; the label was evidently content to let the music filter into the folk and blues communities -- and in those days, they hardly ever even released singles, and weren't a very big presence in the radio marketplace. On the other hand, their relative complacency meant that Washington got to record many of the songs that he was doing on-stage at the time, thus leaving behind a fairly substantial percentage of that end of his repertory (though with a total of 1,200 songs at his fingertips, one suspects it would be futile to try and make too big a dent in any corner of his song bag). The totality of Washington's work also transcended the limitations of the folk scene, bringing him into contact in Canada across the decades with Duke Ellington, Clark Terry, and Lionel Hampton, among other jazz giants, as well as Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Lonnie Johnson in blues. He continued to perform and record blues through the 1970s, and he was the subject of a biographical book in the 1980s. In more recent years, Washington has taken on the role of elder statesman in Canada's jazz, blues, and folk music communities -- especially in Ontario -- and, in his eighties, still performed occasionally in the early 2000s.
| 唱片公司 | 未确定 |
|---|---|
| 地区 | 欧美 |
| 所属公司 | 未确定 |
| 类似歌手 | 相似艺人 |
| 翻唱 | alabamy bound |
| Alias | jackie washington |
| Extra | jackie washington |
| Name | jackie washington |
| 原始名称 | Jackie Washington |
| 名称 | jackie washington |
| 精选上位词 | 歌手 |