ALL MUSIC GUIDE ERRS ON BIO OF HAMILTON’S JACKIE WASHINGTON

About two years ago I notified the online All Music Guide that their biography of Hamilton’s Jackie Washington contained a number of errors because its author had mixed biographical information of two Jackie Washingtons. I explained further that I, with Jackie, was the co-author of his two autobiographies, Talks with Jackie Washington and More Than A Blues Singer.

Alas, this mess of an entry remains. It contains, accurately, the dates of Jackie’s birth and death, but one of the albums in the abbreviated list of three is not his. A good place to go, however, to have this mess sorted out is www.wirz.de/music/washing.htm, a “labor-of-love” for the other Jackie Washington, where you’ll find complete discographies and photos of the album covers of both men.

The irony in all this is, of course, that the bio’s author, Bruce Eder, is a respected historian of both music and film. Or maybe that’s another Bruce Eder.

By the way, the offending passages that don’t apply to Hamilton’s Jackie are below. I know he would have been very amused by the confusion….

“Born Jackie Washington Landron to a family of West Indian and Puerto Rican descent ………..he worked at various times under both names, performing music as Jackie Washington, and as Jackie Ladron when he worked as an actor, his second career

He was signed to Vanguard Records in the early ’60s, and began performing extensively in the United States, especially in New York’s Greenwich Village at venues such as Gerdes’ Folk City and other friendly havens for the music. One of the songs in his repertory was a version of “Nottamun Town,” a mountain song recorded and written by Jean Ritchie that he adapted musically to a minor key into his own style, with a droning sound on the guitar. Among the audience members who heard him do this song was Bob Dylan, who asked to hear it several times, according to Washington in the Eric Von Schmidt book Baby Let Me Follow You Down. A while later, Dylan’s “Masters of War,” re-creating Washington’s music from his version of “Nottamun Town,” was released on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the album that established the latter’s primacy in the contemporary folk music landscape. Washington talked of suing but evidently never did. He later took a savage swipe at Dylan’s sound and his opportunistic streak, however, on “Long Black Cadillac” — which sounded like a parody of “Like a Rolling Stone,” in an electric arrangement by Felix Pappalardi, featuring the Youngbloods — which was released in May 1967 on his LP Morning Song, his fourth for Vanguard. In the interim, he’d also released the live album Jackie Washington at Club 47 and the soul-flavored single “Why Don’t They Let Me Be,” all attracting relatively little attention.

The unfortunate part about Washington’s recording career — for Washington — was that Vanguard never really pushed his recordings; the label was evidently content to let the music filter into the folk and blues communities — and in those days, they hardly ever even released singles, and weren’t a very big presence in the radio marketplace. On the other hand, their relative complacency meant that Washington got to record many of the songs that he was doing on-stage at the time, thus leaving behind a fairly substantial percentage of that end of his repertory

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