Crayons To Perfume's Girl of the Week is Koko Taylor along with the girls of 60's Rhythm & Blues!

Crayons to Perfume presents the ladies of 60's rhythm & blues with our girl of the week, KoKo Taylor. Koko rose from being a Tennessee share croppers daughter to being Chicago's Queen of the Blues when she met Willie Dixon who helped her get signed to Chess Records in 1962. Koko released many records in her day, but it was the live performances that were her passion. Right up until her death in 2009 she was still touring and doing about 200 dates a year!

We also hear from the great Barbara Lynn, Little Ester, Sinner Strong, Queen Ester, and Mitty Collier, all on our show #19 which you can hear, here. You can stream via the pop up player and download using the mp3-128k link.

Mitty Collier was a frequent guest on the short lived TV show The Beat!!!. Here she is doing I Had A Talk With My Man.




-I'm really excited about our next show - featuring Girls in the Garage! Tune in Wednesday at 7pm!

The Iceman Cometh To Atlanta

Jerry Butler, St. John & The Cardinals and Grover Mitchell at Atlanta's Kitten's Korner, Februrary, 1968.

Things could be far, far worse.

Three Sixpacks, Two Arms And A Juke Box

Johnny Seay  -  Three Sixpacks, Two Arms And A Juke Box 

Most of Johnny's hits, not that there were all that many of them - but he did have a smattering of chart success stretching from the late 1950s until near the end of the 60s, were released under the name of Johnny Sea.  The pronunciation didn't change, only the spelling, when he reverted to his birth name of Seay.  In any event, this 1968 outing gets my nod for the Honky-Tonk Record Of The Week, full-up with fiddles, steel guitar and heart-wrenching lyrics about blotting out pain with the help of a little binge drinking.

"Fanilla Fudge"

A while back, a nice woman named Debbi* contacted me at work about buying her son's Star Wars toys, and mentioned that she also had some comics and trading cards from her childhood. I bought what she had, and in our conversation, she mentioned that she thought that she had some more Monkees memorabilia packed away, which I urged her to bring in. A few weeks later, she returned with a batch of cool stuff... two partial fan club kits that had belonged to her and her sister (which, combined, mad one near-complete one), some newsletters, some of the mail-order-only magazines from Tiger Beat, and a batch of trading cards. Also among them was this oddly mislabeled ticket for a Vanilla Fudge show in her hometown of Simsbury, Connecticut. I'm not really a fan of their sludgy sound, even if they were produced by the late, great Shadow Morton, but this is pretty cool. Thanks, Debbi!

Here they are on the Ray Anthony Show. I'd like to

imagine that they closed the show by jamming with 

Ray on an extended version of Bunny Hop, but I

expect that that was not what happened.

*No relation to our Glorious Leader.

Joe Tex Salutes Little Willie John

As seen in the Jet archives, here's a 1968 photo of Joe Tex performing in Detroit at a memorial benefit for the recently deceased Little Willie John.

Esquerita Awareness Month: "As Time Goes By"

    It's time for the closing ceremonies of Esquerita Awareness Month, so if you start listening to this as soon as it's posted, it'll end right on time a few seconds before midnight. We're going to play you out with the B-side of Esquerita's last single (the flip can be heard here), his version of the 1931 standard better known for Dooley Wilson's version from ten years later, as heard in Casablanca. I was going to offer up my 78 of that version as well, but I can't seem to locate it, and I have a vague memory that it might have cracked beyond playability some years ago. C'est la guerre. And it's not as if you haven't all heard it, anyway.

    Self-indulgent personal note: As a kid growing up in upstate South Carolina in the '70s and '80s, there wasn't much evidence of anything good ever having happened there, so getting my copy of Kicks #3 and learning that Esquerita was from right up the road in Greenville... well, that was pretty gratifying. At last, a fellow South Carolinian who wasn't an embarrassment. I've learned a lot more about local music history since then , -- maybe sometime I'll tell you about the Monstabuckings, from Anderson, for instance-- but that was the first indication that maybe my homeland had spawned something greater than the Marshall Tucker Band*. And for that I'm grateful.

Magnificent Malochi - "As Time Goes By"


*To be fair, there's a lot worse to be found along the "Southern Rock" spectrum, but growing up in a redneck college town (the worst of both worlds!)gave me an exceptionally low tolerance for all AOR music, whether British- or Southern- accented, which has remained with me throughout life.

Esquerita Awareness Month: "Mama Your Daddy's Come Home"

As Esquerita Awareness Month draws to a close, we offer up the great man in another of his many aliases (to refresh your memory: Stephen Quincy Reeder, Jr. AKA Eskew Reeder/Eskew Reeder, Jr. AKA Esquerita AKA Esqrita* AKA S.Q. Reeder AKA Eskew "Esque-Rita" Reeder AKA Magnificent Malochi AKA Mark Malochi AKA Fabulash, and probably more that aren't documented) with a fine entry from 1968. The last solo record he'd release during his lifetime, it doesn't seem to have charted anywhere I can find, despite Billboard's prediction:

On a personal note, this is a particular favorite of my lovely wife. I hope you like it , too!

Magnificent Malochi - "Mama, Your Daddy's Come Home"



*This is how it's rendered in the songwriting credits on Little Richard's "Dew Drop Inn" and "Freedom Blues". Richard apparently nicknamed him "Excreta", so I guess we should add that one to the above litany of names.