“The third night of the inaugural Lincoln Center edition of the Ponderosa Stomp — the annual spring resurrection of forgotten roots-rock and R&B heroes and heroines, founded and held in New Orleans — was an oddly formal affair, compared to the outdoor soul and rockabilly shows presented earlier in the week. ‘Everybody get on your feet/You make me nervous when you’re in your seat,’ Robert Parker sang on Sunday night in a well-preserved voice at the start of his 1966 hit ‘Barefootin’,’ one of the many Crescent City R&B classics associated with the evening’s honoree, producer-arranger-songwriter Wardell Quezergue. But sitting down is where the otherwise delighted audience at Alice Tully Hall stayed during most of the two-hour revue. In New Orleans, when a song like that is in the air, anything short of a shimmy is against the law.
But Quezergue, who turns 80 this year, deserves the lofty setting. In the Sixties and Seventies, he earned the nickname ‘The Creole Beethoven’ for his masterful blend of New Orleans rhythms and commercial wisdom in bedrock soul recordings such as Earl King’s ‘Trick Bag’ (1962), Professor Longhair”s ‘Big Chief’ (1964) and King Floyd’s ‘Groove Me’ (1970), then on mainstream collaborations with Paul Simon and Willie Nelson. At Lincoln Center, Quezergue conducted a ten-piece band from a chair as more than half a dozen of his original charges, including Dr. John, the Dixie Cups, Jean Knight and Tammy Lynn, recreated their biggest hits with him.”
And Jon Pareles covered the event for the New York Times, writing in part that, “the Dixie Cups, the New Orleans girl group, had distributed napkins before the concert, to be waved over the New Orleans second-line parade beat, and they got the audience up and dancing for ‘Iko Iko,’ which they turned into a medley of Mardi Gras songs and ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ After their segment, Rosa Hawkins of the Dixie Cups turned to Mr. Quezergue and said, ‘Thanks for the hits.’”
On the afternoon of Sunday, August 30th, at the Silver Moon Club in Newport, Ark., Sonny Burgess and the Pacers, W.S. Holland, Smoochy Smith, former Little Green Men drummer J.M. Van Eaton and Carl Mann will join forces to celebrate the life of fellow Sun Records alumnus Billy Lee Riley, who died at the age of 75 on August 2nd.
Also appearing: Ace Cannon, Travis Wammack, Dale Hawkins, Teddy Riedel, J.R. Rogers, Teddy “Thunderbird” Hill, Larry Don, Warren Crow, C.W. Gatlin and Silver Moon house band Jeannie & the Guys. Admission is $10, and the show starts at 1PM.
Riley was one of the most crazed rockabillies Sam Phillips ever recorded — which is quite a statement considering the Sun roster included the likes of Charlie Feathers and Jerry Lee Lewis. Despite successes like “Red Hot” and “Flying Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll,” the sharecropper’s son from Pocahantas, Ark. was ultimately one of the “shoulda, coulda, woulda’s” who occupied Phillips’ Memphis stable, too brilliant and too raw for teenagers content listening to Perry Como and Patti Page.
A frequent performer at the Ponderosa Stomp, Riley will certainly be missed. Go here to see footage of him performing at the 2003 Stomp, backed by Deke Dickerson and Slim Harpo’s band.
While in NYC this weekend, the Bo-Keys took a few hours off from the Lincoln Center showcase to play with the Sweet Divines and the City Champs.
I wasn’t able to make either gig, but New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff liked what he heard at Southpaw.
From today’s NYT:
But the high point of the evening came from the middle act, and especially by musicians from the time and place being heavily referenced. The Bo-Keys, an eight-piece band, are Memphis’s current answer to the Bar-Kays, the Stax record label’s house band in the 1960s and ’70s. (They were in town to take part in the Ponderosa Stomp festival, at Lincoln Center through the weekend.) The band’s boss is the bassist Scott Bomar, but it boasts the trumpeter and singer Ben Cauley, an original member of the Bar-Kays and the only survivor of the plane crash that killed Otis Redding. The band’s visual and aural centerpiece, though, is the gravel-voiced guitarist Charles Skip Pitts, who played the music’s stinging, wrangling leads and chicken-scratched through a wah-wah pedal.
The band’s set was a marvel of discipline and dirt, keeping its dance grooves close to the ground, never overplaying or letting solos spiral beyond their tight spaces. In addition to Memphis soul standards like “Soul Finger” the band played “Theme From Shaft,” for which Mr. Pitts originated the guitar part. (Maybe you can hear it in your head: wicka-wicka.) If you remember that sound as something good but limited, watching him play it was something else. Carefully using harmonics, changing up the rhythm of his strumming, violently sliding his hand up the guitar neck, he created a whole percussive and melodic universe out of wicka-wicka. It was the sound of origin and ownership.
On the afternoon of Sunday, August 30th, at the Silver Moon Club in Newport, Ark., 
