Hard to believe this recording of the blues classic 'Nobody Knows' is almost 100 years old. Here is Bessie Smith, the 'Empress of the Blues', nailing it in 1929 on the verge of the Great Depression which was about to strike the US and the world (and Bessie).
You may not think Motörhead your thing, but you might just find the riff head-banging its way in to your weekend. And the sentiment applies everywhere.
Duke Ellington wrote this song in the 1930s, but this recording is from his 1962 collaboration with John Coltrane when he was 63 and Coltrane was 36. Duke is the pianist, 'Trane' the saxophonist. Two innovators from different eras of Jazz (or "American Music" as Duke liked to call it).
Music for Airports is the first of four ambient albums from musician (Roxy Music and solo), producer (U2, Bowie) and artist, Brian Eno. The idea came to him as he sat in the drab atmosphere of 1970s Cologne Bonn Airport. The creative process consisted, in typical Eno style, of splicing together various loops of recordings. It was designed to be played continously and to induce a sense of calm - Eno was a nervous flyer.
In 1968 British singer Dusty Sprngfield left for Memphis to revive her career and expand her range from the pop style of her earlier years (good though it is). The result was the Dusty in Memphis album. Still pop, but no little Soul.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was an English composer and conductor. Born in London in 1875, his mother was English and his father, a descendant of African-American slaves, was from Sierra Leone. He was named by his mother after the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Monkee Mike Nesmith died last month. The Monkees might have been manufactured (The American Beatles) and might have made a silly if loveable tv series, but they produced some great songs helped by songwriters like Neil Diamond who wrote this one.
Nesmith went on to a successful solo career and was one of the early pioneers of music video. Talented family, as his mother invented typewriter correction fluid which earned them all a lot of money.
Okay, it's not a song and Tom can sound stilted to the modern ear - he was actually from Missouri - but there is a real music to Eliot's musing on time which perhaps sits well at this time of year. This is the first part of Burnt Norton (1936) the first poem in the Four Quartets (published in 1944).