First, a few items of business:
1. So, I've totally dropped the ball on this whole 30 blogs in 30 days National Blogging Month or whatever it's called. (Thanks for pointing it out, Ed!) But, to be fair, I do blog every day on my About.com site, so I think that totally counts. Right? Right?!?!
2. Neosporin Lip Treatment smells like curry. The taste has a hint of curry as well. I'm down with curry, but that doesn't mean I want to smear it on my lips.
3. Usually when I post about music stuff, I write about whatever song happens to be stuck in my head. Right now, I'm trying to get a song out of my head. Namely, Mrs. Officer by Lil Wayne. Now, don't get me wrong. I see the appeal in the song. But Brother Lou - who in fact has just posted about it - was singing it today forever and now it's playing my head. My neighbor blasted Lil Wayne - namely, Lollipop - over and over again for weeks. Mostly while I was sleeping. I dreamt about Lil Wayne like 5 nights in a row. And no, not like that. It was more like "Heather and Lil Wayne's Madcap Capers." Once, in some kind of Lil Wayne/Seinfeld collision, I dreamt we had to steal files from a doctor's office. Anyway, I don't want to go through that again, so I'm trying to free myself from Mrs. Officer.
Well, that's out of the way, then. So, Calypso Awakening. Emory Cook was an audio engineering wiz, and he's known for all kinds of super duper recording things ("super duper recording things" - yes, you can quote me on that). He had a label called Cook Records, and even though he did work with lots of different kinds of musicians, he's maybe best known for working with musicians in the Caribbean, especially Calypso musicians in Trinidad and Tobago during the 1950s and 1960s. He basically traveled to T&T and hung out recording music and why isn't that my job?
Cook donated all of the tapes from his label to the Smithsonian, hence this collection from Smithsonian Folkways. It's mostly Lord Melody and The Mighty Sparrow, but it's very cool. If you've got eMusic, you can download it there. I couldn't really find any YouTube stuff from Lord Melody or Mighty Sparrow I was crazy about, so here's Lord Kitchener Sugar Bum Bum instead. (Oh, come on, work with me! Oh, and ps, I still have no idea what happened to my comments. Sorry.):
