This article originally appeared in Living Blues magazine #205 in February, 2010. I had wanted to write it for years. The recordings made by Marcelle Morgantini in Chicago during the 1970s are a definitive evocation of the real blues of the day. Her recording of The Aces is one of my favourite albums. Chicago Blues…
Rendlesham: the truth is in there…
We were drawn by the mystery. It was a journey not so much into a forest, but into the very fabric of our psyches. Yes, forest there was, but it was the unseen that called to us. From the depths of time and space it beckoned us on a two-and-a-half-hour journey from the gentle Chilterns…
Ol’ Jack Frightenum: a true story
Ol' Jack Frightenum lived in the woods, on his own. Not a hermit, for he took visitors and drank in local pubs and ran errands for himself. And he went to the Post Office, to collect his pension and write to the King. But he was always a solitary man and lived alone in his…
I dreamed I saw St Augustine
What people don't get about Bob Dylan is that he is a rocker. He started out as a folkie, singing the traditional songs of Pete Seeger and his great idol Woody Guthrie. The earnest folk community adopted him as one of their own and he rose to fame as the great archetypal folk minstrel. Acoustic…
Stuart Maxwell 