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Today's Birthdays
It was fifty years ago today, when I first heard Eddie Lang...
Lango-Django
Niagara-On-The-Lake, ONModerator
At age 19, I moved to from Akron, Ohio to Toronto, Canada out of fervent opposition to the Vietnam War.
Big city Toronto was exciting, but it turned out to be a lonely town at first. However, somewhere along the line I met Roger M., a fellow American war resister and music lover, who invited me to a Boxing Day "blues party" at his place ... this would have been on Dec. 26, 1970.
When I arrived at Roger's place way out east in suburban Oshawa, it turned out that this party was a very small one, comprised of just Roger, me, and two other young musicians who would go on later to form a western swing band called "Prairie Oyster", very popular in Canada in the 70's/80's. Dennis Delorme on banjo (pedal steel guitar with Prairie Oyster) and a good fiddler whose name I can only remember as "Zeke"...
Our host Roger was a record collector, so every now and then we would stop jamming and listen to some of his vintage 78's.
Roger was particularly proud of a recent side he had picked up, "Blue Room Blues", a 1929 guitar duet by two players I'd never before heard of, Lonnie Johnson and Eddie Lang... and here was the very record he played:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2bwIscUA_o
Lang solos first, and almost immediately the music falters because of Lonnie Johnson's limited abilities as a rhythm guitarist...
... but about 50 seconds in, Lonnie switches to lead guitar and Eddie to rhythm...
... and the heavens part and glorious sunbeams appear...!!!
... and I've been an Eddie Lang fan from that day to this one...
For me, it was love at first hearing and my heartfelt love for Eddie Lang's wonderful playing has not dimmed over the years...
Enjoy!
Happy Boxing Day!
Will
Edgar Degas: "Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.... To draw, you must close your eyes and sing."
Georges Braque: "In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that can’t be explained."
Comments
Good on ya Will! With the benefit of the proverbial 20/20 hindsight we all know that war was total BS propaganda job (as they all are BTW). Some of us knew it back then. I knew it and I was just a tot. I remember getting into a big argument about it with my uncle when I was about 10. Dude was kind of a knothead anyway.
I first heard Venuti and Lang probably about 30 years ago. My first jazz guitar teacher LaRae Johnson turned me onto them. Later I heard the Quintet. End of story....