Blueberry Union

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Of Time and the River

    "At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being, the reward he seeks, the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed..."

Thomas Wolfe

dukejones 8:35 PM - [Link]
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Long Train Runnin'   MP3... 2.9mb
 
I Aint Wastin' Time   MP3... 4.3mb
 
You Don't Know Me  MP3... 3.1mb

Project

    These are songs I recorded with Pro Tools and are part of a project CD that I'm currently working on. Click on the links above to download. I play all the instruments on these tracks. "Long Train Runnin'" and "I Aint Wastin' Time" are multi track experimental jams. My friend, Robert Harlan, helped me out with harmonies on "Long Train..." The last song, "You Don't Know Me" is a bare guitar and vocal arrangement. I was trying to record something that sounded intimate.
dukejones 3:15 AM - [Link]
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Download the Movie... 22.5mb

Movie

    I got a hold of one of those little digital cameras and took this movie up in the bachelor pad. It's a Quicktime mp4. It's 22.5mb, give it some time to download. You can watch it and save it whether you have dial up or broadband. You will need to have an application that can play mpegs. I recommend Quicktime. It's free from the Apple website.

    The song is , "Lovin' Arms" by Lightnin' Hopkins. It is on "The Great Electric Show and Dance" album and was originally released by the Jewel record label in 1972.
dukejones 12:30 AM - [Link]
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Let's Get Lost

    So many years, so many years... and I stare through the glass darkly and try to see what there was. The blues came over me so long ago now it's really like dream or another lifetime, someone else's lifetime. I don't know what made me feel this way in first place. I see a trail of beer bottles, cigarette butts and cocktail napkins and wonder how I got here and I wonder how much of it I really want to remember. Real madness, death and betrayal are lurking in the corners of this room like unwelcome guests.

    Some people just can't be satisfied. Some people never find a home. Some people never find the love they need, but to have a thing and lose it is worse than never having it at all. There are so many things that have been lost, but somewhere they exist. Somewhere all that ever was and all that's yet to be are waiting for us, waiting with the patience of the saints.

    I believe we have a purpose. We were put here on this earth to do a job. There's somebody looking out for us, guiding our steps, as it were.

    She is a mistress both cruel and beautiful this lady called the blues. She cries away the lonely nights with all her passion and her joy. Her message is like opium and stronger than death.

    She was born in the hot summer sun of an endless cotton feild. Bare feet on the wooden planks of a sharecropper's shack, a kerosene lamp and moonlight, cold beer, hand rolled cigarettes, an acoustic guitar an old harmonica. She moved to the city. She took the train or a greyhound bus to the loading docks and the factories with electric light and vacuum tubes, the tenement building, an old radio. The sound was broadcast and pressed in celluloid, pressed in vinyl, played through amplifiers in the nightclubs and on stage with dance bands. Jazz and blues are the only uniquely American artforms.

    Pure blues is nothing but improvisation, twelve bars of rhythm and a lot of soul. You can try to capture it with recordings you can write it down on paper and memorize the notes but that is not what it is, and by the time you do that you've lost it.

    I don't even think about it when I'm playing. I think about other things... The music comes from somewhere else, inside. It comes as something like a dream.
dukejones 3:15 AM - [Link]
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Bicycle

    Here's a picture of my old Western Flyer. I found it in a garage sale a few years ago. It's a real English racer with a Sturmey Archer 3 speed hub.

    The Scooby-Do Van is in the body shop getting painted. I've ridden my bicycle all over tarnation since then, and so far it hasn't gotten me stuck anywhere.


dukejones 2:45 PM - [Link]
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Favorite Things

    John Coltrane recorded his version of "My Favorite Things" in 1960. It was written by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein for the musical, "The Sound of Music." McCoy Tyner plays piano on the original John Coltrane recording and the song is included in the "Real Book," a collection of Jazz standards used by professional Jazz musicians.

    These lists seem to be on blogs everywhere.

1. Pretty Women
   
2. Vintage Guitars
   
3. My Mother
   
4. Perseverance
   
5. Spicy Food
   
6. Country Roads
   
7. Sleeping Late
   
8. Rainy Days
   
9. Anything Wild
   
10. Little Churches
    

dukejones 10:00 AM - [Link]
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I'm Through With Dames


    I've made up my mind. I'm through with dames, once and for all. Let's face it, they're just not worth the trouble and brother, where there's dames there's trouble. Don't get me wrong, I'm not ready to join the boys choir or anything drastic. I can admire the feminine form from afar like you would admire a hand grenade but once you go and spill your guts to a dame and try to cuddle up next to her, brother you are in for a load of misery. Get ready to start spending money on salad and bottled water, clean all of the whiskers out of the sink and change your underwear every day.

    Oh it's all right to be married to a woman, I guess. Every man has a right to find out what that's all about but if you ever get clear of her don't fall back into that trap. Being on your own again is like regaining your sanity. If love is a form of madness as the philosopher says then once you get shed of a woman you're like a recovering alcoholic. Falling back into love is like having a relapse. It's a sign of weakness. The biggest fool on earth is a man in the clutches of an evil hearted woman.
dukejones 8:30 PM - [Link]
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...a conversation I overheard at a recent show.

     Duke Jones had just finished a long set of Jive and Boogie numbers and at the break I walked out on the patio to stretch my legs in the cool night air. Outside the Five Spot Brother Lavender was talking to Crazy John about the price of tea in China. A bright young girl in a blue dress so tight it would rip, sure, if she walked another block, halted, enraptured, not ten feet away. "Now I remember when they closed the sporting houses down on Catfish Reef," said Crazy John. "Handsome Lanier was pushing cards for the machine candidates in the city election. It was all about a real estate deal. That's when I came up to Vinegar Hill."

    Vinegar Hill is dry. The night spots on the hill like Jimmie's Place or the old Reddi Room are either grandfathered in or are just this side of the district line. Brother Lavendar replied, "The Mayor and his boys, they can run the bulldozers over the whole town if they want but they can't erase the past.

     Just like the time I delivered the electric organ for Ray Charles at the old Music Hall. The stage manager walked me around back there and said, "The ghost of Yule Brenner was often seen smoking a cigarette in the green room." The old Music Hall is gone now and the city council is in the process of outlawing smoking altogether but as Crazy John and Brother Lavender continued their conversation I could hear the sound of a saxaphone from a little club around the corner and it was as if the ghosts of Arnett Cobb, Goree Carter and Ivory Joe Hunter were still walking the gaslit streets of Market Square and riding the electric trolley up to Kashmere Gardens.

Max Diameter (publicist)

dukejones 2:35 PM - [Link]
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