[Dixielandjazz] Who said white guys from the Bronx couldn't sing the blues?

[Steve barbone]

This article is a little off beat, but some may find it interesting. After
all, Dion, like many OKOMers was a protege of John Hammond, (who turned him
on to Robert Johnson) one of the first white Rock and Rollers and a
stylistic influence on Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan and Bruce
Springsteen.

He was perhaps definitive NY Rock influence of the 1960s. Dion who??? Read
to find out.

Cheers,
Steve

A King of the Bronx Reclaims His Country-Blues Heart

By FRED GOODMAN NY Times January 4, 2006

Sometimes the unlikeliest record is the catalyst in a career, and even the
artist isn't sure why. Dion DiMucci, the Bronx-born singer known simply as
Dion, whose doo-wop and rock hits of the late 1950's and early 60's included
"A Teenager in Love," "The Wanderer" and "Runaround Sue," is, with Frankie
Lymon, one of the defining bookends of the New York style of street-corner
singing. Yet the record that set the course of his life was Hank Williams's
"Honky Tonk Blues" - a song as far removed from the life of an 11-year-old
growing up on 183rd Street as you could find.

"I had no idea what a honky-tonk or jambalaya was," Dion said of hearing the
record on Don Larkin's country music radio show out of Newark. "When you're
a kid, and your mom is cooking sauce in the kitchen on a Sunday, and this
song comes on the radio, and all you can say is, 'Who is that?,' it's hard
to say how that stuff moves your insides. But I liked that he sounded so
committed. At the end of a sentence, he almost dug into the last word and
ripped it off with his mouth."

That was 1949 - two years before the disk jockey Alan Freed coined the
phrase "rock 'n' roll." Now 66, Dion has come back to his prerock roots with
"Bronx in Blue" (Dimensional Music Recordings), a spare collection of
acoustic blues standards which might be compared to Johnny Cash's last,
stripped-down recordings for Rick Rubin's American label.

It might also prompt a reconsideration of Dion's already impressive career.
His impact on New York rock is enormous: Paul Simon, Lou Reed, Bruce
Springsteen and Billy Joel have all acknowledged a stylistic debt, and Bob
Dylan has cited him as a spur for his decision to go electric. But there's
nothing parochial about the album.

Accompanying himself deftly on acoustic guitar - one of the album's
surprises - he added only occasional guitar overdubs and minimal percussion,
trying to replicate the feel of blues classics like John Lee Hooker's
"Walkin' Boogie" by miking his foot. Though the album was recorded in a
Miami studio, Dion sounds as if he were sitting in his bedroom playing for
himself. He will seek to replicate that ambience when he performs songs from
the album at Joe's Pub on Monday and the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe on
Tuesday. 

With Dion's reputation as one of New York's great street-corner singers, his
obvious comfort with material associated with rural America seems
contradictory - but not to him. "I don't sing black, I don't sing white, I
sing Bronx," he said. "There was a record store on Fordham Road, Cousins,
and the owner, Mr. Donatello, took a liking to me. He would call me when a
new Hank Williams record came out."

Armed with an $8 Gibson guitar his uncle found in a pawn shop, Dion began
learning the songs and writing his own, some inspired by the blues songs
that a building superintendent, Willie Green, introduced him to. "My home
was filled with unresolved conflict," he said. "And you could write a little
song where the world made sense and resolve it. Sitting on the stoop, I
found you could sing things you couldn't say otherwise. That's why guys sit
in bars and play the jukebox and say, 'I like the way he sings that song':
it's full of the things they can't say."

After his early hits, Dion became the first rock performer signed to
Columbia Records. While his 1963 recordings of blues songs like "Spoonful"
and "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man" made him one of the first white rockers
to tackle the music, Columbia pushed him to develop a nightclub act - with a
result that the same albums also featured Bobby Darin-type arrangements of
standards. "They used to say, 'You've got to do some legitimate music,'
which implied that what I liked was illegitimate," Dion said. "That was when
I really started freaking out. Aretha Franklin was there at the same time,
and they had her doing Al Jolson songs. They didn't know what to do with
us."

One of the positive aspects of that period was meeting John Hammond, the
storied Columbia executive who signed Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Mr. Dylan
and Mr. Springsteen. As he had with Mr. Dylan, Mr. Hammond turned Dion on to
Robert Johnson. "He said, 'We sold 25,000 copies of this record by word of
mouth,' " Dion recalled. "I was selling a million copies of 'Ruby Baby' at
the time, and I thought, 'Gee, he seems excited,' so I listened to it and it
got me excited, too. Some of the guys I played it for couldn't hear it, but
I heard it. It's the naked cry of the human heart apart from God, wanting to
feel at home."

Dion said that despite being urged at various times by Bonnie Raitt, Van
Morrison and Steven Van Zandt to make an album of blues, he never seriously
considered it until a record producer, Richard Gottehrer, heard him talking
about his early influences and performing examples on the National Public
Radio program "Fresh Air," and suggested a session on his Dimensional Music
Recordings label. And it wasn't until Dion actually began working on the
record that he realized how these songs had been "the undercurrent of
everything."

"You can't hear me thinking on this record," he said with a laugh. "I guess
when you're an adult, things don't affect you like they do when you're 13
and vulnerable, and I didn't realize how much Hank Williams and Jimmy Reed
were a part of me. It's all the music that kept me honest through the years.
You can learn how to sing rock 'n' roll, but I don't know if you can learn
how to sing blues because you have to sing without an agenda to capture it.
It's so beautiful; you can express anything. I think it fell out of the
sky."