#elvie thomas

[sonicandvisualsurprises]

Pick Poor Robin Clean - Geeshie Wiley & Elvie Thomas

1931

A chilling slice of early country blues

Little is known about Geeshie Wiley, but her music speaks loud—raw, spare, and deeply haunting.

[sixohsixoheightfourtwo]

13 19 27 for the music asks please 💚

13. a reboot of a song/songs you already loved (remix, mashup, acoustic, etc.)

oh i Lovvvveeeee reboots of many and sundry kinds... can i do covers do covers count. i'm gonna do covers.

Elizabeth Fraser / This Mortal Coil'ss version of Tim Buckley's Song to the Siren -

Elizabeth Fraser -

Tim Buckley (on of all things the Monkees show) -

I was also really pumped to hear Pick Poor Robin Clean in SINNERS!!! i have been into the OG version of that by Geeshie Wiley & Elvie Thomas for a long time (content warning period typical language...)

I also love their Last Kind Words Blues one of THEE great blues songs -

which had an INSANE cover by Dex Romweber duo with Jack White -

MAJOR moment for me when this came out . ...

There isn't a lot known about Geeshie & Elvie but this NYT piece on them does probably as much as is possible: "There are musicians as obscure as Wiley and Thomas, and musicians as great, but in none does the Venn diagram of greatness and lostness reveal such vast and bewildering co-extent." here's Chris Thomas King (important blues artist) on the lengths he went to to get an original copy of Last Kind Words. There's fewer than 10 original copies of their records - three discs, six songs - left in existence.

i've also been obsessed for some years with the Wailers version of Like A Rolling Stone which takes elements of Bob Dylan but adds some verses and is WILDLY different

19. a song from an artist whose old music you enjoy more than their new music

HMMMM!!!! I'm not very up to date on new music. I willlll say that . I truly love the band Young Fathers. my favourite boyband <3. have seen them live several times (they are Very compelling live .. the first time i saw them they had such a quality of strangeness and newness to their movements and their presence it was immediately clear I was seeing something important) although not for a couple of years... they remain interesting to me. But i do prefer their first couple of albums (tape one, tape two, dead) over the next couple of albums.

27. an instrumental song

hhhhh what shall i give you. well I listen to a certain amount of non western music. Once at a festival I saw the Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekuria perform with the Dutch punk band The Ex and at the time i was like. this is the greatest thing ive ever seen and heard in my LIFE. They did two collab albums BUT the track i keep coming back to is not really a collab - it's a pure solo by Getatchew in the Tizita / Tezeta (nostalgia, longing) genre, which starts around 39.19 in the video below (could only find it in a full album upload on youtube). I think he was about 70 when they made this album.

music asks

[classicladiesofcolor]

The only known photograph of singer Elvie Thomas (L.V. Thomas).

[blackrockandrollmusic-blog]

Lost Women of the Blues and the Birth of Modern Black Music

Daphne Brooks & Jeremiah Sullivan discuss his search for legendary blues artists Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas as well as race records, the politics of blues collecting, and the glorious and turbulent history of black music in America.

[classicladiesofcolor]

The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie

On the trail of the phantom women who changed American music and then vanished without a trace.

The duo recorded a batch of songs that for more than half a century have been numbered among the masterpieces of prewar American music, in particular two, Elvie’s “Motherless Child Blues” and Geeshie’s “Last Kind Words Blues”.

[classicladiesofcolor]

Elvie Thomas — “Motherless Child Blues”, ca. 1930

[20thcenturystarlet]

Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas c.1930

[whatevernatureis]

The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie

On the trail of the phantom women who changed American music and then vanished without a trace.

So the song Last Kind Words Blues is a bit of a legend among blues fans; it was one of only a handful of songs recorded by the Texan duo Geeshie Wiley and L.V. Thomas. Beyond that, though, it’s an incredibly haunting song. It’s very atypical for blues in that it’s in a minor key, spending lots of time on one of the loneliest and most despairing A minor chords in the history of music, with lots of spooky dissonances in the harmony, and evocative floating verses about “the German war”, willing one’s body to vultures, gazing across the Mississippi, and trauma.

However, it was only one of a handful of songs Geeshie and L.V./Elvie ever recorded, back in 1930, before they went their separate ways and left music. And then via 52 Weeks of Blues I found this article digging into their roots. It’s so damn tantalizing, that we have these records of the voices and music of people who lived out their lives and died long ago, that we have such a central part of their souls with us but know so little about their lives. Elvie was a lesbian, Geeshie may or may not have been queer as well. Geeshie was part Indian or Mexican; it’s not known. And Geeshie also stabbed her husband to death, for unknown reasons and to unknown consequences. The article’s incredibly written, and what the author and Caitlin dig up is incredible (though queerness, mysterious pasts, and murder all figure largely in blues history).