BLOG: Mitch Wilson, Austin TX Web & Multimedia Developer – Austin, TX

Fav Song/Video: Sweet Georgia Brown

You have got to watch this video of Anita O'Day at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. Not only a great song, by an artist new to me, but the video is both hilarious and heartbreaking. The ennui of the crowd is painful; the camera captures some gut-splitting boredom. But she wins them over! Anita O'Day (who died recently, on November 23, 2006) sings with soul I wouldn't expect from her appearance: white gloves all prim and proper. It's an interesting journey finding new music on the Internet.

I logged into my Yahoo Music Jukebox to find an ad for a new Johnny Cash release, At San Quentin. Who doesn't love Johnny Cash? It's great, check it out. On the CD, the Carter Family performed Wildwood Flowers. The Carter Family is just awesome, completely country but also completely cool and what I consider to be true musicians breaking all boundaries of genre -- they are just awesome, like I said. Also, the Stratler Brothers perform Flowers on the Wall. Very nice. Anyway, the MC mentioned that the Carter Family created the country music sound, so I looked up Country Music on Wikipedia, where I found mention of Kokomo Arnolds, apparentely one of the great Amercia Blues mucisians from the early 20th century. You should check out his stuff: great blues guitar, not that cliché crap you hear these days. It turns out that alot of people have covered his song "Milk Cow Blues," big names like Elvis Presley, Aerosmith, and The Rolling Stones. So I listen to some of the Stones, which makes me want to check out more 60's rock, so I search Yahoo for The Beatles (I'm still checking out all the music I can find on Yahoo Music). Looking through a couple of Beatles releases, I keep noticing this song, Sweet Georgia Brown, so I listen to The Beatles and it's really good. So I Google Sweet Georgia Brown to find the video on YouTube of Anita O'Day (first link in this post). So there you have it. I should make a playlist of all these songs. Quite the mix.