Music
Bo Carter's solo work is notable for being sexually suggestive in songs and this is carried on to an extent with the group. They primarily earned their income like Robert Johnson and Skip James. They toured throughout the Southern United States, but also reached as far north as Chicago and New York.
Their first and biggest success was "Sitting on Top of the World" (1930), later to be recorded by Bob Wills (numerous times), Howlin' Wolf, Nat King Cole, Bill Monroe, Harry Belafonte, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Cream, Grateful Dead, Jeff Healey, John Lee Hooker, Bill Frisell and Jack White, and re-done by Robert Johnson, as "Come On in My Kitchen". The song was also the theme to the film A Face in the Crowd (1957) produced by Elia Kazan and starring Andy Griffith. Throughout their five active years, the Mississippi Sheiks recorded over seventy songs for the Okeh, Paramount and Bluebird labels.
Their last recording session as the Mississippi Sheiks was in 1936. Bo made a few more sessions on his own, but by 1938 he too was dropped. When the band dissolved, the Chatmon brothers gave up music and returned to farming.
The Sheiks and related groups under other names, such as Mississippi Mud Steppers and Blacksnakes, recorded about a hundred sides in the first half of the 1930s, among them original compositions (probably by Vinson) like "The World is Going Wrong" and "I've Got Blood in My Eyes For You" (1931) - both recorded by Bob Dylan - or the topical "Sales Tax" (1934).
Sam Chatmon made more recordings in the 1960s and Walter Vinson contributed three selections (using the Mississippi Sheiks band name) to Riverside's 1961 series, Chicago: The Living Legends.
Read more about this topic: Mississippi Sheiks
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“Good music is very close to primitive language.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“... the majority of colored men do not yet think it worth while that women aspire to higher education.... The three R’s, a little music and a good deal of dancing, a first rate dress-maker and a bottle of magnolia balm, are quite enough generally to render charming any woman possessed of tact and the capacity for worshipping masculinity.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)
“While the music is performed, the cameras linger savagely over the faces of the audience. What a bottomless chasm of vacuity they reveal! Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, whose vacant faces flicker over the TV screen, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures . . .”
—Paul Johnson (b. 1928)