Mick Jaggar talked about how listening to the music of people like Lightening Hopkins and others helped shape the direction the Rolling Stones would take as a band. But these new players are not interested in simply being influenced, they want to be the sound of those guitars and sing those songs.
Now, as usual, I'm getting ahead of myself - but not too much. You see, in spite of the fact that the events took place in 1953; the recordings are just now being released to the public. On February 26th and 28th Big Bill Broonzy performed concerts in Amsterdam. These concerts had been recorded at the time, using the best sound equipment available, but the tapes had never been mastered let alone pressed into record.
What makes the quality of these tapes that much more superior than any equivalent live concert was the fact the man who recorded the concerts was a movie sound recorder, and later Dutch film producer and director Louis Van Gasteren. He used his film equipment. I have never heard a live recording from that time period where the sound is so impeccable. You can hear everything in perfect proportion down to the coughs and shuffles in the audience.
Each disc of Amsterdam Live Concerts 1953 is one of the two nights, and either Bill changed his program night to night or they've edited it to be this way, but there are no repeats from one night to the next. (Although he does forget what he played at the beginning of the night and repeats himself, but that seems to be more an influence of the gin that he was paid in for letting his music be recorded.) Contained within his set lists are a basic primer of some of the most important and famous blues, folk, and spiritual music of the first half of the twentieth century and the last half of the nineteenth.
In between songs he proves himself to be a raconteur of the highest quality as well. The sets are sprinkled with anecdotes relating to music, songs, the blues lifestyle, and life in the South and being a black person. He opens the first disc by talking about the songs he's going to sing and what he has to call them. He says because somebody has decided the music he plays is folk music, spirituals, or the blues that's what they have to be called. He'd just call them songs if he was able to, but others have ideas on what they are supposed to be.
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