Just prior to posting this, ME heard about the death of David Crosby at 81. ME can’t deal with all the rock/celebrity passings and so will just point you to his previous Crosby six-pack. RIP old hippie.

Time for ME to come out of his creaky old man cave and see what “today’s youth” might be putting on their go-go boots and dancing to at the discotheque. Let’s get crackin’

First up – You know her, you love her, you can’t live without her – blueswoman Samantha Fish. We are way past that stupid time when women were “allowed” in the hyper-testosterone world of music to do no more than strum a guitar and look pretty. Certainly, a number of women changed that but in the modern blues area I give a lot of credit to trailblazer Bonnie Raitt.

L’histoire: Samantha Fish grew up in Kansas City, Missouri and started out playing the drums, but when she was 15 she switched to guitar. Samantha and her sister were both drawn towards blues in their teenage years.

At last count, Fish has won something like 21 awards which is 21 more than ME ever one for anything except for that 4th-grade essay and the acrylic Sales Support Award.

Sam released her first album over 20 years ago and her most recent album, Faster, was released in 2021. I imagine this tune, “Brand New Cadillac,” will be on some upcoming tome. Here she smokes it with country/rockabilly dude Jesse Dayton.

I always liked Boys II Men, an a capella group from ME’s hometown of Philadelphia, PA. (“I wasn’t born so much as fell out”). Unbelievably the “boys” have been doing their thing since nineteen hundred and eighty-eight AD.

In this take, we got a song of theirs called “Doin’ Just Fine. (JustDizle Afrobeats Remix).” But instead of the original, we got ourselves a remix here doin’ the beats on the street with the hip and the hop. (ME doesn’t know what he’s even talking about here but figured that lingo would make him sound, for once, hip instead of like he needs a hip replacement.) Old school R&B:

A while back I picked up –  and did a post on-  an album called Lost on the River, a collection of Dylan tunes put to music by an assortment of artists. One of them was Taylor Goldsmith. I didn’t really follow him after that, but fortunately fellow blogger Christian did.

This is an excellent tune called “Ghost in the Machine.” It’s got that second-line New Orleans feel:

From their PR: Hardwicke Circus was formed by brothers Jonny and Tom Foster, who had a passion for making music from an early age. They developed a reputation on their street for making a racket but they were not to be deterred. Throughout their school years, they surrounded themselves with the best musicians

Hardwicke Circus jumped in a van. hit the road and haven’t looked back. They earned their stripes in Hells Angels pubs, clubs, theatres, and prisons, during the long journeys making rebel rousing music with the music of Dylan, Springsteen, Philadelphia soul, Motown, the Stray Cats, and more.

Their dynamic live shows and songwriting found a fan and a manager in renowned music veteran Dave Robinson, whose resume includes serving as road manager for Jimi Hendrix and as cofounder of Stiff Records.

This is the super super catchy power pop (?) tune “Every Day I Find the Luck.”

Galactic is a band I’ve only recently become aware of. They are an “American jam band from New Orleans” aka the Big Easy. And they’ve been around since 1994 when Hector was a pup. And now Hector is full-grown and has pups of his own!*

Their influences include rock, funk, brass band, blues, jazz, hip-hop, electronic, and world music. This track is called “Big Whiskers” and it’s my-T-fine.

Last but hardly least comes a song from the band whose name ME wishes he had thought of – Rattlesnake Milk. “What or who is Rattlesnake Milk?

Per Saving Country Music, there’s no real definitive answers, aside from the joint appears to have formed in Lubbock, TX about 2012 around a singer named Lou Lewis who made some crude demo recordings while farming cotton, eventually forming a band with fellow Lubbock residents Zach Davis, Andrew Chavez, and Brad Ivy, playing shows randomly, sometimes uninvited, and often unannounced, taking on a form more akin to an apparition than an actual band.

This tune is called “Die Young.” Hit it boys, and a one-ah and a two-ah!

*I’ve worked with a lot of characters. I worked with one guy from Maine, a guy who drove a fork truck in a factory. He used to say this all the time.