A Story of Good ForTUNE

or A Majestic Music Tale (in three verses)

It would be fairly flash of me to suggest my recent trip to America was in part a field trip to gather material towards the FMS, but that's pretty much what happened. It went like this:

On the first day at our Airbnb in New Hampshire we decided to walk the 20 minutes into the modest town centre of Conway. The first small business we entered was the Sweet Maple Cafe where Margaret picked up a free newspaper 'The Conway Daily Sun' full of local 'What's On' in the area. It had an article 'Travel the Blues Highway' at First Friday at Majestic. A former Southern radio DJ John Howell was giving a talk at 1pm in the Majestic Theatre, just along the road. We thought we'd go.

On entering we were welcomed by a bevy of volunteers keen to show us the theatre building, its Music Center history and the Majestic Cafe. Their friendly enthusiasm saw us buy tickets for that evening's Jazz night (and before we left we signed up for the following night's folk music too), but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The fascinating lunchtime talk was advertised as Bob Dylan 'Highway 61 Revisited', with that part of the talk to be on a later date. Today John Howell spoke of the Delta blues artists - Muddy Walers, Charley Patton, Son House, Howlin' Wolf and Robert Johnson. He showed some great videos of the these artists along with John Lee Hooker performing 'Boom Boom'. This is the actual video he showed us.

As the video mentions at the start many artists have covered this song and coincidentally, later during our stay, while browsing the book shop minutes from our Airbnb, a store brilliantly named 'The Local BOOKie', the owner had the radio tuned to a local station, and on comes a version of 'Boom Boom' by Big Head Todd & the Monsters from 1997 that actually has John Lee Hooker guesting on the track. (tune in here).

Next Verse (Part of this Tale) - coming midweek.