Monday, January 10, 2011

Minimum Wage Blues

Robert Curtis Smith- Clarksdale Blues



Biography:
"A chance meeting with Chris Strachwitz, founder of Arhoolie Records, at the Big 6 Barber Shop in Clarksdale led to the magnificent 1961 Bluesville album Clarksdale Blues, his lone full-length album. The record didn’t seem to make much of an impact, sinking without a trace and over the year becoming highly collectible.

In the liner notes Mack McCormick wrote: 'Robert Curtis Smith is a hard working farm laborer in upper Mississippi. He supports a wife and eight children by driving a tractor ($3 a day top) during the farming season, by hunting rabbits in the winter. He has a borrowed guitar with which he sings of women he has loved, lost, discarded, or found worthy of erotic praise. …The status quo in his world is to sap the strength and exploit the weakness of Negroes. It is a far more vicious crime than the occasional lynching since the end result is the massive weakening of a strong people. Ideas of inferiority are fed to him hand-in-hand with conditions that patently are inferior. Badly deprived of constitutional privilege and the minimum wage, and lacking the know-how to correct his situation, Smith’s way of life is astonishingly out of step with modern times.'"
-SundayBlues.org

Download Link: http://www.zshare.net/download/850148831d9ae581/

3 comments:

mario said...

Bellissimo !!!! Thanks

John said...

Please repost these links, as zshare no longer exists. Thanks.

John said...

Please reup these links, as zshare is no longer online. Thanks.