Tuesday, June 22, 2010

John Miller-"Let's go riding"



Here's a nice out-of-print lp by guitar player (and here banjo and fiddle player as well) John Miller. John is well known for his wonderful playing (and teaching) of Country Blues guitar in the style of the masters of the 1920's and 1930's like Furry Lewis, Robert Wilkins, Bo Carter, Blind Blake, etc... but he's an accomplished musician in other kinds of musical traditions as well (I personnaly love his arrangements of George Gershwin's tunes). This is, i believe one of his first record, issued by Rounder in 1973 but recorded a couple of years before when John was still a student at the university. The first side of the lp is devoted to John's wonderful country Blues guitar playing and his ability to create his own arrangements from classic country Blues recordings is amazing. The second side is a unique opportunity to hear John's venture into old-time music, with many banjo tunes and some fiddle as well. He says in the liner notes that he's been playing banjo for only one year at the time of this recordings and it's quite hard to believe when hearing his excellent numbers on the instrument. John had invited some good musician friends to play with him and among them the excellent guitar flatpicker, Russ Barenberg.
-You can check his website to learn more about his work and teaching.
P.S: Sorry for the bad quality of the pictures but my usual camera is in the repair shop...

16 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey,I really love your blogs and this John Miller is so great,thanks.
Since you changed the back ground to brown i'm having trouble reading what you wrote.Can you please change it to a lighter color so i can see the words,thanks!
Your humble reader,
george (Texas Hobart)

The Irate Pirate said...

gadaya, you seem to be able to psychically predict the exact albums that i'm looking for at any given moment!

Thank you for the umpteenth time!

John Miller is a superb player. Have you heard his stuff with John Reischman?

And cool new design! Very classy. Though george may have a point about the text being a bit harder to read.

Anonymous said...

great stuff--has he ever done an instrumental solo guitar album? -6string

Anonymous said...

How many ways can you say thank you? I sure don't know but I do mean it.
I have a LP copy of John Miller's 'Safe Sweet Home' on Rounder from 1977 that is in pretty good shape. Let me know and I'll upload it if there is any interest.
ralph11

Anonymous said...

How great is this?
John Miller was strongly recommended to me when i posted a Bob Hadley album recently. Now i can hear why, a wonderful player. Many thanks, i love it!


Ralph11,
would love to hear more Miller!

Vega#3 said...

Hi Gadaya! Hope you can adress this issue:

I just downloaded this John Miller LP and as with all other uploads from this site it comes with some strange "_MACOSX Folder" with copies of all mp3s written like this: "._1.Let's Go Riding.mp3" - all files at the size of 82 Bytes!
Also a ".DS_Store" File in the main folder.

Either it is your Setup or Mediafire that causes this problem.

Also I remind you of the comment I made at 4th of May here:

http://timesaintliketheyusedtobe.blogspot.com/2009/11/jean-ritchie-elektra-lp.html

That download should be removed "or" Reuploaded because what is there is just "two problem folders" that can't be deleted or moved and will only cause problems for users. "Cannot be read from source"

Thanks for listening!

I hope you at least answer this comment, because there is no other way of knowing that you are aware of this issue and this is the only way to contact a blogger after all...

Anonymous comments tend to be ignored all over the net, why will forever be an enigma.

Best Regards,

Robert.

Kris said...

This one too is available on CD. I have the vinyl, but since it's in bad shape I looked for a cd version, found it on cduniverse.com.
it's a nice album.
very good blog, keep up the good work!
Kris

D. Christie said...

Amazing! I have never heard o fhim before. thanks so much for posting this- i love the easy rider interpretation!

Gadaya said...

To Robert,
i really don't know why there's a problem with some files i uploaded. I always do the same and it seems to work for most people. I'm really no good about solving this kind of problem...Sorry

The Irate Pirate said...

Do you happen to have that Bertram Levy lp you mentioned, "That Old Gut Feeling"?

I don't normally make requests of you because you always post good things I didn't even know I was looking for, but you've piqued my curiosity :-)

The Irate Pirate said...

@Vega:
Not exactly sure what the problem you're having is; I don't think it's a problem with Gadaya's upload, as it worked fine for me. The .DS Store is a harmless file that Macs create to make their search function happen faster. I don't think it has anything to do with your problem. You might try downloading again, or on a different computer, or using another program to unzip the file.

Anonymous said...

@Robert I believe the ds_store files and other small files are generated and used by macs, you can just erase them after you extract if you're using PC.

and yes this album is awesome I especially like his "how long" version. If you didn't say so I'd think this was recorded years and years ago, this guy's really good. Thanks for a great upload gadaya.

Billy said...

Thanks so much for this: I borrowed this from the library back when it came out, lost the tape I made of it, and just found it today - the first LP on your website. Brilliant.

Vega#3 said...

To Gadaya, I.Pirate, and anon. Thanks for answering my query. I thought however the issue concerned more people than me since the Jean Ritchie (2009 Archive) upload was some cause of problems according to Texas Pines and others comments there.

It seems to be different issues for some but not all, I hear.
I use "ExtractNow" for rar and zip which work with all other uploads on this site and all other music blogs I've been to, that's why I thought the Jean Ritchie upload got corrupted in the first place.

I don't think any person is responsible but sometimes different sort of systems collide with each other especially with these types of uploads.

But I will try some other extracting program and see if the problem persists; "The folder, file can't be deleted, or moved"

I report back when I know more.

Please ignore or maybe delete some of my other comments regarding this issue since they may prove confusing to some.

Best of all to you!

Vega#3 said...

@To Gadaya and Irate:

I tested extracting the Jean Ritchie zip folder using some different programs and the results was good with "WinZip". In the comments to that file someone mentioned that it was password protected, well, it seems the Explorer utility in Windows XP generates that result when trying to extract those files. "ExtractNow" get the result of undeletable folders.

Maybe WinRar and other extracting utilities get better results.

I have Windows XP Service Pack 3 so at least for the Jean Ritchie file it's best to use WinZip.

Also: Someone mentioned Bertram Levy's "That Old Gut Feeling" LP or CD.

It's still for sale as a CD, it seems to be all-instrumental gut string banjo solos.

http://www.countysales.com/php-bin/ecomm4/products.php?product_id=3612


http://elderly.com/also/recordings/items/BLMP3.htm

When searching for the LP version I found another one Flying Fish that seemed to be interesting:

http://www.gemm.com/c/search.pl?field=ARTIST+OR+TITLE&wild=Bertram+Levy&Go%21.x=17&Go%21.y=14

Best Regards,
Robert

Anonymous said...

Just discovered your blog (also love The Old Weird America - thanks for your work. I so appreciate the fact that you haven't sold out to corporate advertising! I also have a music blog which often contains posts of blues and old-time (1920s) records, along with other genres. If you'd like to visit sometime, the address is:

http://catchthattrainandtestify.blogspot.com/

Best wishes,
Marie