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LP
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DOY 676LP
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"Recorded on in 1958 in Los Angeles, CA, Jazz, Folk Songs, Spirituals, & Blues is a rare album by the one-man-band and well-known folk musician Jesse Fuller. Although Fuller always played music on the side, becoming a master of the 12-string guitar (between working for the railroads, lumber companies, or the circus), he did not make his first recording until 1955, when he was already 50 years old. Frustrated by his inability to get a band together, Fuller devised a way to play all the instruments himself, constructing a one-man band system that allowed him to sing and accompany himself on the twelve-string guitar, harmonica, kazoo, cymbals, and a homemade instrument he called the 'fotdella' (played with the big toe of the right foot which hit pedals causing padded hammers to strike against the instrument's six strings). This brilliant and unique album in the blues arena includes Fuller's rendition of traditional blues numbers like 'Take This Hammer' and 'Linin' Track' as well as his own compositions like 'Fingerbuster' and '99 Years.'" 180 gram vinyl.
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CD
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FLED 3074CD
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Jesse "The Lone Cat" Fuller (1896-1976) was one of the great American blues troubadours. A remarkably expressive singer and fine 12-string guitarist, Fuller developed his unique Bay Area street performance one-man-band around his fotdella (a foot-operated hammer-and-pedal string bass) and harmonica/kazoo/cymbals/washboard-rig, and would later go on to record for labels such as Cavalier, Good Time Jazz, and Prestige. This CD includes his earliest recordings, including the original version of his classic "San Francisco Bay Blues," together with a splendid session taped in London in 1965 for Topic Records. One track, "John Henry," has been unavailable since the early 1960s. In the 1960s, the decade when the wider world reached out to embrace him, Fuller's "San Francisco Bay Blues" became one of the most popular numbers in the standard repertoire of blues and folk singers at that time. But Fuller was not a blues musician, although he played the blues. Neither was he strictly-speaking a folk musician, as the term was then understood, for his act incorporated elements of minstrelsy and vaudeville -- in other words, show business -- and he'd travelled far beyond the "rurals" to work in Hollywood. His own term "folk songster" best describes who he was and what he did. This record is just as important as a document of an oft-neglected historical aspect of American music as it is a tribute to the peculiar talents of a quite remarkable musician. Housed in stylish digifile packaging, including extensive sleevenotes by legendary producer Joe Boyd and acclaimed UK photographer Val Wilmer.
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