Live - From The Lone Star Cafe & The Great Southeast Music Hall (CD)
Talley, James
1-CD with 32-page booklet, 17 tracks. Playing time approx. 72 mns.
Live recordings featuring the Oklahoma-born folk, country, and blues singer/songwriter and guitarist, James Talley. The recordings were made in 1979 at the Great Southeast Music Hall, Atlanta, Georgia, and at the Lone Star Cafe, New York, NY. Personnel: James Talley - vocals, guitar, acoustic guitar; Larry Chaney - vocals, electric guitar; John Salem - vocals, keyboards; Peter Keeble - drums.
MOMENTS IN TIME,
MUSICIANS, BRICK MASONS, FRIENDS AND TRUE RELIEVERS
THE WINTER OF '79 ...
I've always enjoyed performing my work in concert with a good band, and I don't think I know a single songwriter who doesn't want to share his or her songs with an audience. Certainly, we don't write them to sing to ourselves. Music is created to be performed, whether it's delta blues or a symphony. The ultimate test, then, for a writer-performer is: can you deliver 'the goods' before an audience ... live? In February and March, 1979, I did two dates each, at the Lone Star Cafe in New York City and the Great Southeast Music Hall in Atlanta.
I had assembled an exciting touring band of five bright, young musicians. Three of them, Larry Chaney (electric guitar), John Salem (piano), and Bill Hawks (bass) had been recruited the previous autumn for the concert I did for Marlboro at the American Grand Prix races in Watkins Glen, New York. (Film maker, Julius Potocsny, made a wonderful film of that Watkins Glen performance for Philip Morris.) I was unable to keep the entire Watkins Glen band together, however, for these winter shows in New York and Atlanta. So I engaged two new players, Chip Hager (harmonica) and Peter Keeble (drums), for these shows. On the band's first trip to New York, the first week in February, we also did a live radio concert on WHN in New York. This was broadcast live from the Lone Star.
Larry Chaney, John Salem and Bill Hawks were all from Wichita, Kansas, and had grown up and played music together for a number of years. They had come to Nashville to play music, and court their dreams, like so many other young musicians have done, before and since. Chip Hager was from Conway, Arkansas, a Vietnam Navy veteran, expert jeweler, serious Budweiser consumer, and unparalleled blues aficionado. He had played with Larry Raspberry and the Highsteppers out of Memphis, and was recommended to me by our mutual friend, Greg 'Fingers' Taylor. Peter Keeble was a Nashville native, art history graduate, and was operating a
small recording studio in Nashville at the time. The chance to play some live music, however, with some very talented musicians was about all it took to get him out of the studio and back on the road.
FRIENDS AND TRUE BELIEVERS ...
Creativity, I have always felt, is a very solitary thing; but no one can really achieve much, or share that creativity, without the understan-ding and assistance of others. So it is with music, business, and life. There were probably no bigger supporters, fans, or true believers in me and the music I was creating in the mid to late 1970s than Jack Tarver, the owner of the Great Southeast Music Hall, and Mort Cooperman at the Lone Star Cafe played the Music Hall on my very first tour as a new artist on Capita Records in 1976, and when the Lone Star opened in 1977, Mort Cooperman asked me to play at the opening, which I was unable to do, as I did not have my band assembled at the time.
The Lone Star was always a treat to play, and New York was always an exciting place for young musicians from places like Wichita, Kansas and Conway, Arkansas. John Salem said to me recently that he will always remember the 'three alarm chili' and swapping quips with Mort at 3:00 A.M.. There was as well, on these New York trips, the spiritual reinforcement from friends in the press like John Walsh, who was then at Newsweek, and Nat Hentoff at the Village Voice, and many others.
Atlanta always had tremendous audiences too, and Jack Tarver was a performance himself in those days. Jack and I spent many of our off afternoons floating down the Chattahoochie River in a rubber raft, drinking Miller Lite from the cooler. I never knew with whom I would be called upon to perform at the Music Hall—Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, the Nighthawks, John Prine, or B.B. King. Both The Lone Star and the Music Hall booked a stellar array of talent.
The memories go deep, and I have never forgotten the support and friendship extended to me by these two club owners. So it seems only fitting, then, that these tapes, recorded at these two clubs, should be resurrected and released as a live album, even now, fifteen years after the original recordings were made.
| Medium 1 |
| Id | Name | Interpret |
| 1 | Tryin' Like The Devil | |
| 2 | Woman Trouble | |
| 3 | Whiskey On The Side | |
| 4 | Dixie Blues | |
| 5 | W. Lee O'Daniel And The Light Crust Doughboys | |
| 6 | Not Even When It's Over | |
| 7 | Nothin' Like Love | |
| 8 | Find Somebody And Love Them | |
| 9 | Survivors | |
| 10 | Bluesman | |
| 11 | I Can't Surrender | |
| 12 | We Keep Tryin' | |
| 13 | Are You Gonna Make Us Outlaws Again | |
| 14 | Give My Love To Mary | |
| 15 | Alabama Summertime | |
| 16 | Take Me To The Country | |
| 17 | Take A Whiff On Me | |
