Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Slim Eppinger, Fats Hardy, Thomas Bumpas, et al

Here is another video snippette from fieldwork and documentary projects I've conducted over the past 30 years or so. It's on YouTube here.

This is part of the Ninth Street Revival project in Chattanooga in 1994 (see earlier post).



I'll put a link to (a fully-mixed and professionally recorded) mp3 of the concert later. Check out Slim Eppinger, an important blues and R&B and soul guitarist in Chattanooga.

You can also go to my website and find a pdf file of a semi-scholarly/general-reader magazine article I wrote, "Doing Fine on Big Nine," from ETSU's Now and Then Magazine.

One big connection with Virginia and all this Black music from Chattanooga is that many of these guys played in Virginia, at clubs and frat parties, during their bands' heyday. They played colleges all up and down the mid-Atlantic. Easter's Weekend at U.Va. would not have been the same without the Coachmen or the Inclines in the 1960s, or later groups into the '70s. Clyde Stubblefield played drums for James Brown in University Hall back in the day.