Born To Be Blue
This song was the product of a thirty plus year collaboration between myself and The Legendary Brother Memphis Tommy Hall. A relationship that was nurtured in Chitlin circuit nightclubs, recording studios and innumerable Baptist, Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches throughout the deep south. When we werent playing Gospel music we were playing Jazz, Soul, Country and any other bit of Americana vaguely suggesting the Blues and its kindred forms. It was mostly played in living rooms where the sound of Brother Memphis cornet or trumpet and my guitar and voice could find a comfortable ambience along with a cheap four track for recording purposes.
This is the first in a series of recordings released from those sessions that came to be known as The Living Room Tapes. Most of them are rough and unpolished, the product of an almost completely improvised process. It is the way that music sounds when musicians have nothing more at stake than a desire to play and a willingness to let the music take its own course.
The accompanying video gave me a chance to use two complimentary art forms to tell a story. The film, The Last Time I Saw Paris, is now in the public domain and features a stunning Parisian backdrop and a young and almost painfully beautiful Elizabeth Taylor. It also stars the much underrated Van Johnson with a script loosely based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story Babylon Revisited.
While the song itself was recorded quickly making the video was a far more arduous task. In order to have the song and film tell the same story it became necessary to completely reedit the original. Taking sequences out of context so that a nearly 2 hr. movie could tell a very different story and fit the lyrical content of a less than 5 minute song. When our collaboration first began making a video like this would have been nearly impossible. With computers and some basic technology whole new worlds open up.