BB calls FF “Hype Machine’s Music Speed Dating”:

Hype Machine has introduced a new feature called Fast Forward that’s like speed dating for indie rock fans and indie rock songs. Here’s how it works: After clicking “go” on the Fast Forward home page, Hype Machine plays 30-second samples of songs and shows the blog post from which the song came. (For the uninitiated, the Hype Machine is a streaming service that plays songs that have been posted at a select group of music blogs.)

If Fast Forward seems familiar, it may remind you of Shuffler.fm, a great site that streams music from music blogs through a couple dozen or so curated channels of both mainstream and niche genres. Each song played at Shuffler comes with the blog page with the source music (Shuffler takes the music from each blog’s RSS feed), allowing the listener to read up on the artist as the song plays. Shuffler launched last year, got some good press and won a B2C award at MidemNet Labs startup competition earlier this year.

It’s striking that Billboard, which is the voice of the legacy music industry, has a friendly feeling towards both hypem and shuffler.

gurdonark’s walk in the park video has a chimpy charm. The music is my Ella Waltz recording.

By email he commented: I left in too many of those transitions, which are every bit as amusing and clunky as Windows Movie Maker transitions. I’d take them out if I were doing it again. Overall, I pronounced Pinnacle VideoSpin a worthy successor.

Prince Albert Hunt was a pioneer of western swing. His fiddling had a ferocious groove. It was just outrageously swinging and hot.

Here’s a 30 minute super-8 documentary about him from 1974:

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Warning: there are some flashes of racism in the blunt old school style.

The link above goes to a full length version. This embedded version is a trailer:

I found this film and these people had charm.

Working from this history of the song Maiden’s Prayer on Wikipedia…

1856

Sentimental salon tosh original, published as “Modlitwa dziewicy” in 1856 in Warsaw, Poland

A medium difficulty short piano piece for intermediate pianists. Some have liked it for its charming and romantic melody: others have described it as “sentimental salon tosh.” The pianist and academic Arthur Loesser described it as “this dowdy product of ineptitude.”

1935

That sounds almost nothing like the Bob Wills version, published in 1935, via YouTube

The American musician Bob Wills arranged the piece in the Western swing style and wrote lyrics for it. He published it first in 1935 as “Maiden’s Prayer”; later, it became a standard, recorded by many artists.

2009

Mike Auldridge casual jam on it.

74 years after the Bob Wills version it keeps just the chord progression and a few fragments of the melody.

Juneberry78s makes and sells their own MP3s of 78s. It’s an amazing resource for old time music.

There are free samples galore. I’ve been lost in their MP3s of cajun 78s for days.

Here is Uncle Bob Larkan and Uncle Sam McRee, Sr., with the boys and girls that go to make up the happy groups of “Arkansans” that so many hear and enjoy. Typical old southern melodies and old fashioned tunes make up their efforts to please you.

Via Juneberry 78s blog

A couple Sacred Harp tunes.

Sacred Harp 457 Wayfaring Stranger

Sacred Harp 276: Bridgewater