Tuba Skinny

[Uncle Al]

Found this - Love it
This will get your toes a tappin'

Tuba Skinny - Jubilee Stomp - Royal Street I 2018--Recorded in New Orleans 04/07/2018

Uncle Al

[weeladdie18]

I can hardly hear the wash board in the background .....I used to play a wash board with a soup can, with the soup can lid inside the soup can ...
An interesting noise.....It looks as if the player is wearing a bottle neck slide on his right hand.....

Perhaps we ought to get into a bottle neck blues rent party and sell our homemade moonshine to pay the rent.....
Every man carried a fire arm to protect himself at these events.....

Perhaps a skirt wearing male would need a fire arm to protect himself at an illegal moonshine party.............L.O.L.

[weeladdie18]

We had an old Hoover washing Machine with an aluminium wash board as a lid over the washing tub....

One of the problems with wearing Thimbles whist playing a wash board was Finger Cramp ...due to the tightness of the thimbles on the fingers....

Anyone remember Nancy Whiskey and Freight Train.....? .....What was her partner's name....? .....Back in the days of skiffle in the fifties ?

[pelmut]

Anyone remember Nancy Whiskey and Freight Train.....? .....What was her partner's name....? .....Back in the days of skiffle in the fifties ?

Chas McDevitt.

I re-mastered the CD reissue from Chas's own copy on a 78. The interesting story he told was that they had done about 20 'takes' and it still didn't sound right, so they were totally exhausted and on the point of giving up on it. Then he hit on the idea of whistling part of the melody, just for the hell of it - and it worked so well they decided to issue that version.  Unfortunately they were all so knackered that nobody noticed his guitar had gone out of tune, so that was how it sounded in the final release and is the reason why his version has that special mournful quality.

[beachlion]

Found this - Love it
This will get your toes a tappin'

Tuba Skinny - Jubilee Stomp - Royal Street I 2018--Recorded in New Orleans 04/07/2018

Uncle Al

As a lazy pensioner I like to check my e-mails and other stuff right after I wake up, on a tablet while still in bed.

As a fan of New Orleans jazz and Dixieland, I had found the group some time ago. Thanks for the nice way to start my day.

Here is one of my favorites, even for a non-religious guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oThwrtMaH9c

[Taj]

Great little ensemble! Someone gave me an old sousaphone to fix up. I usually play a concert Bb contra-bass (tuba). Gotta get some work done on that old horn now.

[Kirbstone]

À great link, Uncle Al.

Just my kind of traditional jazz and wonderfully performed by a group of very compleat young professionals. Their combination of instruments works very well and their choice of numbers makes for great entertainment....all the better for seeing them perform on a sunny street.

Tom

[weeladdie18]

Anyone remember Nancy Whiskey and Freight Train.....? .....What was her partner's name....? .....Back in the days of skiffle in the fifties ?

Chas McDevitt.

I re-mastered the CD reissue from Chas's own copy on a 78. The interesting story he told was that they had done about 20 'takes' and it still didn't sound right, so they were totally exhausted and on the point of giving up on it. Then he hit on the idea of whistling part of the melody, just for the hell of it - and it worked so well they decided to issue that version.  Unfortunately they were all so knackered that nobody noticed his guitar had gone out of tune, so that was how it sounded in the final release and is the reason why his version has that special mournful quality.

Thanks for that pelmut....It must be 10 to 15 years ago ,I was down at the Old Exeter Maritime Museum site and a busking classical guitarist turned up
and started playing......He was wearing His Morning Suit....Pinstripe Trousers and Black Jacket....He started Playing Classical Eastern European Music
He informed me he had just done the Tiverton Market and was preparing his Program of music for his forth comming Eastern European Tour.
He clarified that the previous year he had been the opening act....After completing his act , he returned to his dressing room and a well built
lady knocked on his door ....The lady introduced herself as Nancy Whisky of Freight Train fame....and informed him that she had enjoyed his performance
and asked the Guitarist if he would accompany her act as her backing musicians had not turned up.......So I was being entertained by a guitarist
who had accompanied Nancy Whisky on her Eastern European Tour............

[Fred in Skirts]

A little history of Freight Train and Nancy Whiskey.

Nancy Whiskey
Vocalist whose hit song Freight Train made her, briefly, the queen of skiffle

Dean Steel

Fri 7 Feb 2003 19.34 EST

If Lonnie Donegan was the king of skiffle, then Nancy Whiskey, who has died aged 67, was fleetingly its queen. As vocalist with the Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group, she had a top five hit in the summer of 1957 with Freight Train, arecord that also penetrated the American top 40 at a time when British artists rarely made any headway.

Her success came in that confused time, in the aftermath of the breakthrough of rock 'n' roll in 1956, when British record buyers, searching for an exciting, homegrown musical form, encountered both local rock 'n' rollers and skiffle.

Here was a style which loosely reinterpreted aspects of the American folk and blues tradition, and encouraged a generation of amateurs to play - up to a point - several basic instruments, principally guitar, washboard and tea-chest bass. It also enabled radical politics and crass commercialism to rub shoulders.

Freight Train was driven by Whiskey's ebullient soprano and McDevitt's whistled obligato. It was the group's first single, and its upbeat arrangement belied the gloomy lyrics of its 1905 composition by black North Carolina singer Elizabeth Cotton. Its unexpected US success led to appearances by Whiskey and McDevitt on the Ed Sullivan Show, and other television slots, and a handful of stage shows, including one at Palisades Park, New Jersey.

The new music was accompanied by a brief flurry of British rock 'n' roll movies. The McDevitt group featured in The Tommy Steele Story (1957) - a fictionalised biography of Britain's first rock 'n' roll star - and a year later they were in The Golden Disc, built around the ephemeral popularity of Terry Dene. With the birth of CND in 1957, Freight Train, rewritten as H-Bomb by John Brunner, became a part of the ban-the-bomb marches.

Like Donegan (obituary, November 5 2002), Whiskey was born to a musical family in Glasgow. After her father, a lorry driver, taught her the guitar, she performed on the local folk club circuit while attending art school as part of her apprenticeship as a potter. Among her fellow students was Jimmie McGregor, the singer and guitarist later resident on Tonight, the BBC television magazine programme of the late 1950s and early 1960s. He introduced her to blues and hillbilly music, though it was from a Glasgow folk song, The Calton Weaver - with its "Whiskey, whiskey, Nancy, whiskey" chorus - that she took her stage name. She had been born Anne Wilson.

On McGregor's recommendation, she was signed to the independent folk label, Topic. After moving to London in 1955, she was reluctant to surrender her growing reputation as a solo performer, but was persuaded to join the Chas McDevitt group for a Radio Luxembourg talent contest.

After their US appearances, Whiskey and McDevitt recorded a well-received album, The Intoxicating Miss Whiskey, and managed another Top 30 entry with Greenback Dollar. The failure of the follow-up, Face In The Rain, was among the factors that led her to resume her solo career. Another was her pregnancy, and subsequent marriage, to pianist and drummer Bob Kelly - he was not yet divorced, and the episode triggered a brief flurry in the tabloids.

With Kelly in her backing group, the Skifflers, Whiskey put out three more singles and an LP, Nancy Whiskey Sings, before the skiffle craze was over. Renaming her accompanists the Teetotallers, she broadened her appeal with more generalised pop and jazz standards, and proved capable of quite a sophisticated cabaret act. Records were adjuncts to earnings on the road, and there were further attempts at the charts with Bowling Green (1965), and a remake of Freight Train two years later.

By the 1970s, family commitments had forced Whiskey into virtual retirement, though from her home in Leicester she resurfaced occasionally, most recently at a skiffle revival with Lonnie Donegan, at the Royal Albert Hall in March 1999.

Her husband died in 1999. She is survived by her daughter Yancey, named after the blues piano player Jimmy Yancey.

· Nancy Whiskey (Anne Alexandra Young Wilson), singer and guitarist, born March 4 1935; died February 1 2003

[Fred in Skirts]

Here is the lyrics to Freight Train, a song I still enjoy...

Freight Train Lyrics
Freight train, freight train, goin so fast

Freight train, freight train, goin so fast
I don't know what train he's on

Won't you tell me where he's gone

Don't know where he's headin for

What he's done against the law

Got no future, got no hope

Just nothin but the rope

Freight train, freight train, goin so fast

Freight train, freight train, goin so fast

I don't know what train he's on

Won't you tell me where he's gone

He lost his reason, lost his life
He killed his friend in mortal strife

He must have moved like the golden skies

Just a-waitin til he dies

Freight train, freight train, goin so fast

Freight train, freight train, goin so fast

I don't know what train he's on

Won't you tell me where he's gone

When he dies, just bury him please
Way down the end of old Chestnut Street

Poplars at his head and feet

And tell them he's gone to sleep

Freight train, freight train, goin so fast

Freight train, freight train, goin so fast

I don't know what train he's on

Won't you tell me where he's gone

[r.m.anderson]

Found this - Love it
This will get your toes a tappin'

Tuba Skinny - Jubilee Stomp - Royal Street I 2018--Recorded in New Orleans 04/07/2018

Uncle Al

At about 1:55 into the piece two people past from left to right in front of the group.
The first one - nothing out of the ordinary ---
The 2nd one - I could swear that that person is wearing a tight camouflage SKIRT !

[pelmut]

· Nancy Whiskey (Anne Alexandra Young Wilson), singer and guitarist, born March 4 1935; died February 1 2003

After her death, her daughter was clearing out the attic and found a direct-cut disc of her mother performing at Birmingham Town Hall in her heyday.  The P.A. system had been in the verge of howling and the acoustics were dreadful, but after several passes through various filters I cleaned it up enough to be listenable and I believe it was eventually issued on a CD by Rollercoaster Records.

[weeladdie18]

Thank you Fred and Pelmut.......Lonnie Donegan was one of my skiffle heroes ....I saw his last public performance in Weymouth Pavillion.......
If I remember correctly the tour moved to Peterborough for the next performance .Unfortunately Lonnie was admitted to hospital and passed away
due to cardiac problems...The high point of his show for me was his drummer marching round the stage playing his snare drum for the introduction
the "The Battle of New Orleans "......Well we took a little butter and we took little beans........

His copywrighting of Leadbelly's twelve bar blues collection was another story.....Leadbelly sang his way out of prison....interesting stories

[Uncle Al]

The part of the clip that really made me smile ( ) was when a
couple walked by, on the right, then started dancing down
the sidewalk. They were having a real good time

Uncle Al

[Sinned]

My father played guitar a little and apparently was part of a skiffle group in the early '50's. I grew up listening to the likes of Lonnie Donegan and Tommy Steel.