Today's Happy Hour Soundtrack

Etta, with a cover of "Stormy Weather" (has ANY song been covered more than this?  I think not)...



We've written about Ms. James... one of our favorite chirps... before.  Like this:

I've been privileged to see Etta James on a number of occasions, the most memorable o' which was in a small pub in Camden Town (in London) back in the day, which is to say sometime during 1980 - 1983.  When I say "small," I mean SMALL... as in "could mebbe seat 100 people, with another 50 standing."  The Second Mrs. Pennington and I arrived at said pub about two hours before show time in order to secure seats before Etta's performance, knowing full well how small it was from previous experience with that venue.  The end result was we were both very well-oiled by the time Etta took the stage (and I use the term "stage" loosely)  but that did NOT diminish the experience in the least.  Miz James did two sets that night, if memory serves, and that evening was one of my very best musical experiences... which included the opportunity to say "hi" and thank her personally for her performance.  It don't get no better than that, Gentle Reader.

Indeed.  You're sorely missed, Ms. James... but you live on in our memory and in our record collection.

Related: There's this about that...

I have NO ideer how I missed the roll-out of Google Play's timeline, only becoming aware of it today via a tweet.  Like this:

The Guardian has a good article about the timeline, which includes this lil bit o' wisdom:

That big colourful splodge, just above these words? That's all of pop history, that is. Well, all of pop history according to Google. Or, to be more specific, all of pop history according to Google Play users. Or, to be even more specific, all of pop history as defined by what Google Play users have in their music libraries.

It's Google's new Music Timeline, which searches Google Play users' libraries to see which artists they have music by. Artists are then categorised by genre, and genres subdivided. What it provides, then, is a rough-and-ready map of the popularities of genres and artists over the years. Bear in mind, it's not logging what people listen to, but what they own. And equally, note that Google Play users are a pretty small subset of music fans.

[...]

So, a flawed tool, certainly. But by God you could waste hours fiddling with this stuff!

Yes, indeedy.  We played with this app for at least two hours today and will incorporate it, as the occasion demands, in future music postings.  And, apropos o' not much, one can PLAINLY see in that timeline when shit went wrong, which is to say about 1983, when hip-hop arrived on the scene.  "Apocalypse Now," in other words.  Former Happy Days, in this case, weren't so fuckin' happy.