mama fried chicken

2011 is burning down to an ash, just how I like it.

Mem Shannon, A Cab Driver's Blues
Shrimp City Slim, I Work Nights
Carol Fran and Clarence Holliman, It's About Time

• Happy birthday, Mem Shannon!
  
  "I keep telling everybody, you know, po-boy sandwiches don't taste like they used to taste."
  "No, you right."
  "I don't know if it was the mayonnaise they were using or what."
  "It's because we'd eat one of them every now and then, then."
  "Yeah, it was special."
  "I remember when I was a youngster, and I'm 71 now, when my mama fried chicken, that was a special supper. Now, chicken, it's common."
  
  - Dialogue snippet from Mem Shannon's "5th Ward Horseman" from A Cab Driver's Blues, maybe the best Louisiana blues album there is, alternating between tasty, anecdotal funky blues and actual New Orleans taxi cab confessions. Check out "$17.00 Brunette". Doctors and lawyers don't tip for shit.
  
  
• Also, happy birthday to my mother-in-law Frances sitting on a porch somewhere up in the hereafter, tapping her foot. One of the first times I met her, she fried up some chicken in a little electric skillet. So good, it's about ruined me for fried chicken ever since.
  
  


• My annual list of the five most intriguing Baton Rouge CD's of 2011 is up in this week's Record Crate blog for 225. Read em' and weep. Or cheer, or tear at your flesh, or whatever reaction lists like these bring out in you.
  
  
• Some of you better get busy proofing your books, you.
  
  
• I am such a short timer for this year. In four days we embark on an Emerald Isle trip that will hopefully be accompanied by spotty wireless so that I may enjoy moments just for themselves for a bit, refocus my lens a little. I am excited about the whole itinerary but realized that I will get to watch the season two premiere of Sherlock on actual BBC One which lit a match around an already combustible tableau.