Song 308: This week on the playlist you can hear the song After Midnight by JJ Cale, who also wrote the song. It seemed appropriate to follow last week’s post of a track by the King of the Slide Guitar Elmore James with another cut that features slide guitar, although this one does so in a much more laid back manner. After my 1971 summer in Atlanta, when I discovered the music of the Allman Brothers, quickly developed an appreciation of Duane Allman’s slide guitar wizardry, and even made a vain attempt at sliding up and down a guitar fretboard, the following summer, this record started lighting up the airwaves. My failed attempts at playing slide guitar had deepened my appreciation of the technique, and of the musicians who had mastered it, so for me, this track came along at exactly the right time. Little did I know then that JJ had released the song as a single 6 years earlier, and I had also missed Eric Clapton’s hit version from 1970. It was actually Clapton’s hit that prompted Cale to re-record the piece and include it as part of a complete album called Naturally. Not long after this single appeared, Naturally I added the LP to my collection, and it spent plenty of time spinning on my turntable. Sadly, JJ died of a heart attack about 3 years ago, in July of 2013, at the age of 74, so even After Midnight these days, he’s not gonna cause talk and suspicion any more, but maybe once in a while some of the rest of us can, and we can occasionally think of him and the inspiration he provided for doing so.
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