This is the most exhilarating chapter we have covered in class yet. Not to talk down to the country music I addressed last week, but seeing the correlation between Rhythm and Blues with the combination of Gospel and Soul music created several genres that appealed to a wide audience, one of those audiences being my parents. When I was younger my father was a big fan of Ray Charles. I heard so much of his music that I assumed anytime I heard someone with that swing kind of Rhythm I though it was always Ray Charles. The most interesting part of last week class for me was that Ray Charles took a gospel tune, then rewrote the lyrics, keeping the melody, then BAM! a crazy hit that has stood the test of time. Later in the 1960s, Johnny Cash and June Carter did a cover of Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman” live at Folsom Prison. I think it is amazing that this song started as a gospel tune, then went to a Rhythm and Blues/Soul song, then was covered into a pretty fantastic country sounding jam. The accessibility and changing of one song over and over allows for artists to make a great impact using a song that everyone is already familir with.Also within the reading the song “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner with Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats was used in a popular video game several years ago, Fallout 3, I heard the opening beginning and realized I have heard this song hundreds of times before without realizing it was from this time. Also, after hearing “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” By Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five, I remembered a music class I took in middle school were we had to sing that song with our classmates. Granted, the version I heard in school was not the same one we listened to in class, but to say I like Louis Jordan’s version better. We also discussed Muddy Waters and his song “Hoochie Coochie Man”. Hearing this song shows the template for other Urban Blues artists to have a similar beat and style. George Thorogood and the Destroyer’s song “Bad to the Bone” has the same idea and beat that illustrates how far the blues has come since the days of Muddy Waters. Looking forward at the blues artists to come, for instance, one of my favorites, Stevie Ray Vaughn, it’s easy to see the influence of artists like Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and T-Bone Walker. These artists set the stepping stones for modern blues artists to take the pentatonic blues scale and run wild with it. Watching early Chuck Berry play, then fast-forwarding 20 years to see how much guitar chops have increased makes me think that if someone like Stevie Ray Vaughn playing his style in the mid 1940s, the crowds minds would be blown. Kind of similar to in the movie “Back to the Future” when Marty plays Johnny B. Goode in front of the audience of 1950s teenagers.