Clameur de Haro’s Friday Music R&R # 2

Favourable comment (most received via e-mail, interestingly, rather than through the Comments link, but who’s worrying?) on Clameur de Haro’s posting of the Lynyrd Skynyrd clip last Friday prompts a further effort to mark the welcome end of this – disappointingly no less adjectival than last - week.

Musical history is replete with outstanding blues guitarists, but not too many of them, for some reason, have been women. They’ve always been out there, of course, from Memphis Minnie onwards, and of the more recently well-known performers in the genre, CdeH enjoys listening especially to Laurie Morvan and Teresa Russell.

However, it’s the truly phenomenal Bonnie Raitt who, for CdeH, overshadows them all: it’s Raitt’s occasional forays into more commercial material which have brought the wider recognition she so richly deserves, but as a blues player she’s just on a totally higher plane.

Digressing for just a moment, Clameur de Haro would willingly see the Biased BBC broken up, its Charter revoked, and its protected status abolished. His socially libertarian, economically free-market principles abhor the perpetuation of a blatantly partisan state broadcaster which is funded almost in its entirety by a highly regressive tax, compulsorily extracted from the populace on pain of imprisonment, irrespective of whether they choose its product or not – and which then competes directly with its commercial rivals in disseminating dumbed-down pabulum to the unquestioning and the undiscriminating.

But - there are some things which the Beeboids alone have done, and still do, very well, and which CdeH would willingly exercise freedom of choice to buy on pay-per-view or pay-per-listen subscription. Among those are The Proms, and of course, The Old Grey Whistle Test (again, yes, yes, I know, I know…)

Which brings us back, albeit a tad tortuously, it has to be admitted, to where we were, because, yet again on a Friday evening, here’s another Whistle Test absolute gem – from 1976 this time, Bonnie Raitt performing “Love Me Like A Man”.

Classic blues. Enjoy…………

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