Word: wails
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Winter is the swingingest, funkiest new white blues singer to come out of the South in years. His electric guitar crackles with a kind of voltage that can only come from the gut, not an AC outlet. His singing ranges from a harsh, staccato yell to a high soprano wail. Many of his songs are his own-improvised on the spot, or written down the night before. Like Leland, Mississippi Blues, which he sang to a crowd of shouting enthusiasts recently at Manhattan's Fillmore East...
...Aretha Franklin at the top of the female jazz, blues and soul camp. On piano, she can tinkle along simply like Count Basic or pile chord upon chord like Rubinstein playing Tchaikovsky. At times, her voice has the reedy wobble of a Dixieland clarinet, but it can also whisper, wail, or break in above the instrumental accompaniment like an Indian shehnai. As Ray Charles notes, nobody ever comes close to imitating her, or even trying, "probably because everybody knows she's the only one who can do it." To Jazz Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, Nina is the natural successor...
Nobody performs the blues like B. B. King -except, perhaps, Lucille. Resplendent in an iridescent raspberry-red suit, King clutches his fists up beside his temples as his voice shifts from a plangent baritone to a falsetto wail: "Worry, worry, worry- worry...
Beck repeats it deep, and the band is together again in a coherent ball of jarring, flaring sound. Beck takes off once more on guitar careening over into a feedback wail, he stops, scratches twice, Hopkins and Waller supply connecting riffs, Beck plays a horn blast. Amid all this discord, Beck, stroke of genius, does a willowing eddy of tune straight out of B.B. King. An abrupt stop again, Beck thumps the side of his guitar and bounces on his knees, Waller slams down harshly twice, Beck reels off long liquid strings picking up the early song tune. He starts...
...that "the country was in a throe, a species of eschatological heave." It may seem obvious, but Mailer's writing overcomes the triteness inherent in describing hog-butchering Chicago as the setting for confrontation; he succeeds in connecting the cries of the bloodied hippies to the eerie death wail of the gutted cattle. "Chicago was a town where nobody could ever forget how the money was made," he writes. "It was picked up from the floors still slippery with blood, and if one did not protest and take a vow of vegetables, one knew at least that life...