Word: tonk
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Anyone else would have left for the gig 20 minutes ago. Not Gary Stewart, who, at 32, has suddenly become a star of the rowdiest brand of country rock -honky-tonk. Were he in a larger town, promoters and agents would be nervously pinching their digitals. But this is a languid evening in Fort Pierce, Fla., Stewart's home town, and the squeak of a front-porch rocker is music enough for now. Besides, one must rest after a supper of pork chops and okra. Digestion is a ritual, a time for introspective belching. "It stays nice and slow...
...Honky-tonk songs, like Pistol Packin ' Mama, came out of Texas in the late 1930s and early '40s. Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis adapted the style to rock 'n' roll in the '50s. Sometimes called rockabilly, it celebrates booze, gambling, fighting, steppin' out, temptation and, like all country music, love. Honkin' is the word for having a good time. In the olden days the distinctive instrumental sound of honky-tonk was tinny guitar and pianoplunk. Today the new rockabilly is a country-and-western/rhythm-and-blues mix, and its dominant sound is a heavily...
...once and future jazz. A season's billboard reads like an arpeggio of jazz excitement: Teddy Wilson, Benny Carter, Charles Mingus, Count Basie, Thelonius Monk, Milt Hinton, Cootie Williams, Maynard Ferguson, Buddy Rich, Stan Getz, Earl Hines, Herbie Hancock, Dizzy Gillespie. They are playing blues, bop, jazz rock, honky tonk and ethereal moondust. The newest jazz center is in SoHo lofts, where young audiences gather to hear warm, contrapuntal, richly melodic explorations. "We never repeat," says Sam Rivers, founder of Studio Rivbea. "For three hours straight, ideas keep flourishing...
...looks like just another neighborhood ice cream parlor. There's a honky-tonk piano in one corner and Swedish ivy and wandering jews hang from the ceiling. You can put granola or wheat germ on your natural carob fudge ice cream. The manager, Jeff Lessard, whom everyone just calls Jeff, is an easygoing, non-professional-looking fellow who seems to have taken lessons from Steve, over in Somerville...
After his mother's death, and one argument too many with his father about learning a trade, the boy left home for good at age 14 to become a honky-tonk pianist. It was the only trade he cared about. No doubt Joplin could play "ragged time," as it was first called because of its bouncing bass and syncopated right hand, as bumptiously as the next man. But by the time he began writing his rags down in the late 1890s, they had obviously become objects of care, even personal meaning...