Like father like mother. Looks like Mama Carter is slowly getting back to work and is planning a comeback in a huge way. She has started working on two albums which will eventually hit stores. The Carter family is the definition of hard work.

Since the most talked-about birth of the noughties happened, we’ve only seen Beyonce and Jay-Z step out into the public eye but we hadn’t seen a glimpse of their first born daughter, who was born on January 7.

Beyonce and Jay-Z released pictures of their baby girl Blue Ivy Carter over the weekend along with a handwritten note, which welcomed us to share their joy. It was an admirable thing that the couple decided to share their child to the world on their terms, in their time and without attaching a price tag to it, like so many other celebrities do.

Celebrity stylist June Ambrose has met Blue and mama B; she spoke to US weekly about Bey’s choice to maintain her privacy:

“Beyoncé really, really thought about this, and she really wanted to do it this way. She just couldn’t imagine selling pictures of her baby.”

Amber also said of baby Blue: “She’s definitely very alert, you can see from the photos, you feel like she’s been here before… she’s always in a loving environment, and you can see that she’s born into greatness. I think that’s what those photos really say. She’s a good baby.”

Just by looking at the pictures, you can see Blue got her mother’s good looks. Even Amber said: “A girl with big full lips, she’ll be a supermodel. And her eyes – she’s gorgeous!”

Speaking of gorgeous, Beyonce has been seen out on the town twice since giving birth and has looked absolutely stunning. Its great to see she isn’t losing weight in a hurry like some (*cough* Victoria Beckham) celebrities; not that she needs to – she carries it amazingly.

]]> http://runwayboyz.com/2012/02/11/blue-ivey-carter/ Sun, 12 Feb 2012 02:15:06 +0000 RUNWAYBOYZ http://runwayboyz.com/2012/02/11/blue-ivey-carter/

The First Family of The United States The Obamas  The Carters have finally Released the pictures of the Heir to the Throne, Blue Ivy Carter.

There’s no doubt that Blue is the spitting image of her famous mom and dad. The baby girl is peacefully sleeping in the snapshots as Beyonce looks on with a smile from ear to ear.
Jay-Z shared the intimate family photos, with the message, “We welcome you to share in our joy. Thank you for respecting our privacy during this beautiful time in our lives. The Carter family.” Spoken like a True King.

Beyonce and Her Bundle Of Joy

The world’s first look at Blue Ivy Carter after a month. Congratulations Jay-Z and Beyonce.

My partner and I have been taking mini road trips to different places in Indiana.  We really enjoy discovering small towns that have neat restaurants, antiques, and history.  During our road trips this past weekend we listened to half of the CD’s that were checked out.  I have a new song idea floating around in my head as a result.  The previous week I wrote a new song inspired by my listening selections from the library.  This research endeavor is not only expanding my horizons it is also a source of inspiration.  I really enjoy the older artists and blues music I’ve been listening to lately.  These artists were true story tellers.  I believe music should tell a story.  It’s refreshing to hear music that does and to see where we came from musically on our journey to today’s music.

The songs played were:

Take Apart An Engine – Miss Paula Flynn

Setting The Woods On Fire – Hank Williams

Feudin’ Banjos – Arthur Smith and Don Reno

Buddy Won’t You Roll Down the Line – Uncle Dave Macon

Who’s That Knockin’ At My Window – Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard

It Takes A Worried Man – The Carter Family

Mississippi Girl – Pokey LaFarge & The South City Three

Now And Then There’s A Fool Such As I – Hank Snow

Middle Aged Crazy – Jerry Lee Lewis

Lonesome Fiddle Blues – Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

Friends Forever – Old 97s

Wicked Path Of Sin – Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys

The Christian Life – The Louvin Brothers

Polly – Nirvana

You Don’t Miss Your Water – The Byrds

Still Feeling Blue – Gran Parsons

Why Can’t He Be You – Patsy Cline

Have I Told You Lately That I Love You – Red Foley

Dim Lights, Thick Smoke – Flatt & Scruggs

Dolly Parton — “Just Because I’m a Woman”

“Just Because I’m a Woman” may be the best country answer to slut-shaming on the books. It was apparently Dolly’s response to a conversation she had with her husband about how many lovers they’d had in the past. It’s a pretty simple message, but a powerful one: “My mistakes are no worse than yours, just because I’m a woman.”

Loretta Lynn – “The Pill”

On the country woman badass scale, Loretta Lynn surely earns a place at the top. Lynn was a mother four times over before she had turned 19, taught herself guitar, and began belting out anthems about working class women’s lives. She often sang about birth control and the constant mill of pregnancies that kept women like herself in the home in songs like “One’s on the Way,” but her most famous and controversial song is “The Pill.” Its celebration of birth control got Lynn banned from several country stations, and her label delayed its release by three years. It remains one of the only country singles to directly address reproductive rights, and one of the songs that’s sure to turn up in any biopic of Margaret Sanger. (See also: “We’ve Come A Long Way, Baby” with the immortal lyric “Second class don’t turn me on at all.”)

Wanda Jackson – “My Big Iron Skillet”

Rockabilly pioneer Wanda Jackson was the first woman to break out on her own in the early rock ‘n’ roll days, singing alongside Elvis, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Most of her songs have an edge to them (see: “Fujiyama Mama”), but “My Big Iron Skillet” is about a woman fed up with her husband’s philandering and mistreatment of her. Not that we condone beating your spouse with a skillet, obviously, but it shows a woman standing up for herself, and that’s a thing we can support.

The Carter Family – “Single Girl, Married Girl”

The Carter Family — Sara, Maybelle, and AP, in their first iteration — probably weren’t the first to sing this folk standard, but it echoes the roots of feminism in country and folk music. “Single Girl, Married Girl” is a cautionary tale urging women to savor their independence. The single girl gets to flit about wearing nice clothes while the married girl “rocks the cradle and cries.” Not the best.

Martina McBride – “Independence Day”

Martina McBride wrote this song in celebration of a woman who breaks out of an abusive relationship, standing her ground and heading out to “let freedom ring.” Awesomely, the women who wrote the song, Gretchen Peters, protested Sarah Palin’s use of “Independence Day” in her 2008 campaign by donating all of the royalties to Planned Parenthood in Palin’s name.

Kitty Wells – “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels”

“It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” was written in response to Hank Thompson’s 1952 hit, “The Wild Side of Life,” in which he complains that his woman has left him to go carouse and flirt in the honky-tonks. “Honky-Tonk Angels” sets the record straight: “It’s a shame that the blame is on us women/It’s not true that only you men feel the same/From the start most every heart that’s been broken/was because there always was a man to blame.”

Patsy Montana — “I Wanna Be  Cowboy’s Sweetheart”

The title doesn’t exactly make Patsy Montana seem like a feminist hero, but Montana was, at least, one of the pioneering proto-feminists of the genre. In the 1930s, Montana became the first breakout woman country star, and her ode to being a cowboy wife is really all about wanting to be a cowboy — roping things on the plain and riding horses right along with the men.

Hazel Dickens – ”Don’t Put Her Down (You Helped Put Her There)”

Hazel Dickens was a feminist bluegrass pioneer, devoting much of her life to working for the cause of labor, marching on picket lines, and singing about unions. “Don’t Put Her Down (You Put Her There)” is another rebuke to the idea of loose women populating the honky-tonks and abandoning their men:

“To build her up in a world made by men
At the house down the way, you sneak and you pay
For the love, her body, her shame
Then you call yourself a man, you say you just don’t understand
How a woman could turn out that way”

Jeannie C. Riley – “Harper Valley P.T.A.”

If you want a good country-pop anthem about sticking it to the powers that be, you’ll hardly do better than Jeannie C. Riley’s relentlessly catchy and witty “Harper Valley P.T.A.” The story goes like this: teenage girl gets note from teacher informing her mother that she dresses too scandalously, mom goes into PTA meeting and causes a ruckus by tearing down every one of the members there for their double standards.

Neko Case – “Pretty Girls”

Neko Case once tweeted that  her personal/feminist motto was, “I’m not a woman or man, I’m a  two-fisted-son-of-a-bitch who will punch your lights out and I love you.” Pretty much. She wrote “Pretty Girls” about women waiting to get abortions in the Planned Parenthood clinic, resisting the judgement they’re getting from the outside: “Don’t let the wolves in, pretty girls.”

Carl Perkins

In 1968 Carl Perkins was messing around with the Carter Family hymn Will the Circle Be Unbroken backstage in a dressing room somewhere in Kansas. He was thinking about the Tennessee farm where he grew up with his two brothers and the cotton fields where they had sung the old songs together and started writing down his own words.

The hymn was originally penned by British born songwriter Ada Habershon in 1907. Habershon wrote over 200 hymns during her lifetime as well as essays on the Bible and traveled extensively lecturing on prophecy, miracles and the Old Testament among other things.

Years later the great songcatcher and interpreter A.P. Carter would tweak the words and place them over a slightly different melody to another old song called Sunshine in the Shadows. The earliest recorded version I’ve heard is by Jessie May Hill from about 1927, but Carter most likely had picked it up during his travels before that. Here’s a great version from Ginny Hawker & Kay Justice from their fine album Bristol – A Tribute To the Music of the Original Carter Family from Copper Creek Records.

Carter Family biographer, Mark Zwonitzer, points out in Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone that the melody would have been familiar to many people outside of their general audience. Here is a version from Harry Smith’s Anthology of America Folk Music recorded by the wonderful Pentacostal Church of God In Christ group Elders McIntorsh and Edwards’ Sanctified Singers in 1928:

Elders McIntorsh and Edwards' Sanctified Singers

The Carter Family would record their version twice; once in 1934 and again in 1935. The song would go on to be recorded by numerous bluegrass and country acts culminating with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 1972 star studded revival of it on Will the Circle Be Unbroken.

The Carter Family

This is the song that Carl Perkins was playing around with in that Kansas greenroom in 1968. He had thrown out all the verses, but kept the chorus and instead of a sorrowful funeral song he wrote of the silver linings of a hardscrabble life, the simple pleasures of sitting with your family in a circle singing loud.

In his account of writing the song Perkins said that he stopped playing and looked up at the doorway and Johnny Cash was standing there and asked him if he’d wrote the song. Today in 1969 it became a number one hit.

The songs played were:
Take Apart An Engine – Miss Paula Flynn
Rushing Around – The Peasall Sisters
Snowball – The Handsome Family
The Gal Who Invented Kissing – Hank Snow
Little Glass Of Wine – The Stanley Brothers
What Is A Home Without Love – The Louvin Brothers
The Red Red Robin – Tennessee Ernie Ford
On A Night Like This – Bob Dylan
Music In My Soul – The Bush Family
Shiny Things – Tom Waits
Christmas ’83 – Centro-matic
All Night Long – South San Gabriel
Santa Got Stuck In The Chimney – Ella Fitzgerald
The Hills Of South Armagh – Briege Murphy
When You Coming Home, Girl – Minton Sparks
My Clinch Mountain Home – The Carter Family
Darlin’ Companion – Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash
Hi De Ho Boogie On A Saturday Night – Al Dexter
Footprints In The Snow – Buddy Holly
Silent Night – Eddie Raven

2011 (21 tracks, 1:03:18)

hip-hop/rap

The songs played were:
Take Apart An Engine – Miss Paula Flynn
Chewing Gum – The Carter Family
One Leg At A Time – Malcolm Holcombe
Take Me Back To Tulsa – Bob Wills And His Texas Playboys
There’ll Be Some Changes Made – W. Lee O’Daniel And His Hillbilly Boys
Cigarettes, Whisky And Wild Women – Red Ingle And The Natural Seven
Let Me Wipe The Tears From Your Eyes – Southern Tenant Folk Union
Barroom Girls – Gillian Welch
Flowers Blooming In The Wildwood – The Coon Creek Girls
Window Shopping – Hank Williams
The Woodshop – Madison Violet
Unwanted Sign Upon My Heart – Hank Snow
Please Don’t Tell Me How This Story Ends– Kris Kristofferson
Closer To The Bone – Kris Kristofferson
Driving This Highway – Howling Wolf
Black Mountain Rag – Doc Watson
If The Light Has Gone Out Of Your Soul – Ernest Phipps And His Congregation
I Left You Some Kisses On The Door – Tom T. Hall

2011 (25 tracks, 1:16:13)

#country