Various Artists - Gershwin Prize for Popular Song Honoring Garth Brooks, D.A.R. Constitution Hall, Washington, DC, 3-4-2020

Up until now, I've posted eight "Gershwin Prize for Popular Song" award concerts. There's a bunch more out there; they're just currently very hard to find. Happily, yesterday, a person anonymously sent me this one, so now I can post the ninth. I still call on people to help me post the other ones I've missed. If you have them, please share! Anyway, this one is from 2020, a couple of weeks before the world shut down due to the Covid pandemic, and honors Garth Brooks.

This one is pretty different from the other Gershwin Prize concerts I've found so far. The first half proceeded more or less usually, though it was unique that Brooks himself started the concert by playing a song. But then, instead of playing a couple of songs at the end, or even a few, Brooks basically played a mini-concert. He played no fewer than 15 songs at the end! Admittedly, many of these were short versions, usually only a minute or two, often acoustic cover versions. But still, about half of this tribute concert was performed by Brooks. By comparison, when Joni Mitchell would accept her Gershwin Prize three years later, she would sing only two songs.

The music here is unreleased, and the sound quality is excellent. 

This album is an hour and 45 minutes long. 

01 Ain't Goin' Down ['Til the Sun Comes Up] [Edit] (Garth Brooks with Keith Urban)
02 talk (Jay Leno)
03 Rodeo (Chris Stapleton)
04 talk (Chris Stapleton)
05 Shameless (Chris Stapleton)
06 talk (Keb Mo)
07 The River (Keb Mo)
08 talk (Jay Leno)
09 talk (Keith Urban)
10 We Shall Be Free (Keith Urban)
11 talk (Lee Brice)
12 More than a Memory (Lee Brice)
13 talk (Ricky Scaggs)
14 Callin' Baton Rouge (Ricky Scaggs & the Oak Ridge Boys)
15 talk (Margaret George)
16 For the Last Time (Trisha Yearwood)
17 talk (Trisha Yearwood)
18 The Change (Trisha Yearwood)
19 talk (David Rubenstein)
20 talk (Carla Hayden)
21 talk (Garth Brooks)
22 Vincent (Garth Brooks)
23 Operator [That's Not the Way It Feels] (Garth Brooks)
24 talk (Garth Brooks)
25 Unanswered Prayers (Garth Brooks)
26 talk (Garth Brooks)
27 Sing Me Back Home (Garth Brooks)
28 talk (Garth Brooks)
29 Make You Feel My Love (Garth Brooks)
30 talk (Garth Brooks)
31 [Sittin' On] The Dock of the Bay (Garth Brooks)
32 Ain't No Sunshine (Garth Brooks)
33 talk (Garth Brooks)
34 Wild World (Garth Brooks)
35 talk (Garth Brooks)
36 Night Moves (Garth Brooks)
37 talk (Garth Brooks)
38 That Summer (Garth Brooks)
39 talk (Garth Brooks)
40 The Thunder Rolls (Garth Brooks)
41 talk (Garth Brooks)
42 Piano Man (Garth Brooks)
43 American Pie (Garth Brooks)
44 talk (Garth Brooks)
45 Friends in Low Places (Garth Brooks)
46 talk (Garth Brooks)
47 The Dance [Edit] (Garth Brooks)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/6BuegDKz

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/VAr9F5qWXeMBnC7/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert. 

Keb Mo - Mo at Home - Home Concerts, Franklin, TN, 3-20-2020 to 4-29-2020

Back in 2020 and 2021, due to the Covid pandemic, there were lots of home concerts by different musical artists, and I've posted dozens of them here. But there are a few I just plain forgot to post. I noticed this one today as I was fixing broken links. Yeah, it's a couple of years late, but better late than never. :)

I did manage to post a different 2020 home concert by Keb Mo. You can find that here:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2020/04/keb-mo-home-concert-franklin-tn-4-4-2020.html

This is from a similar time period. But that was one single, album-length performance. This comes from a bunch of different dates over a one month time span. Mo's discography is big enough though that most of the songs are different. The ones played in both are "Grandma's Hands" and "Life Is Beautiful."

Personally, I think Mo's special talent is playing acoustic blues. Unfortunately, he's usually chosen to go in an "adult contemporary" direction instead. So it's great to have recordings like this, where he went back to his acoustic roots.

Everything here is unreleased, by the way. Most of the videos come from Mo's YouTube webpage. He's the one that gave the series of videos the title "Mo at Home."

This album is 44 minutes long.

01 talk (Keb Mo)
02 America the Beautiful (Keb Mo)
03 One Friend (Keb Mo)
04 talk (Keb Mo)
05 I'm a Hero (Keb Mo)
06 talk (Keb Mo)
07 Hand It Over (Keb Mo)
08 talk (Keb Mo)
09 Just like You (Keb Mo)
10 I See Love (Keb Mo)
11 Grandma's Hands (Keb Mo)
12 talk (Keb Mo)
13 I'm Telling You Now (Keb Mo)
14 In Spite of Ourselves (Keb Mo & Robbie Brooks Moore)
15 I'll Be Your Water (Keb Mo)
16 Dangerous Mood (Keb Mo)
17 Life Is Beautiful (Keb Mo)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15158165/KebM_2020_MoatomeHmeConcertsFrnklinTN__3-20-2020_to_4-29-2020_atse.zip.html

The cover is a screenshot from one of the YouTube videos of the songs here.

Keb Mo - Memphis Bar and Grill, Richmond, VA, 6-21-1995

Having just returned from a long vacation, when I got back I searched the Internet for good music that has popped up while I was gone. One thing I came across was this bootleg concert. It's been around for years, apparently, but it was new to me. 

I think Keb Mo is very talented, but I'm frustrated with most of his albums. I feel what makes his music special is when he plays the blues, especially acoustic blues, yet on his albums he often tends to go for a generic "adult contemporary" poppy sound. That wasn't the case for his debut album, 1994's "Keb Mo," which is one of his best. This is a solo acoustic concert from when he was promoting that album and was heavily into his blues mode. 

Not surprisingly, he played nearly every song from that album. But the concert is twice as long as the album (an hour and twenty minutes), so he played many other songs too. Generally, that means some bluesy covers, as well as originals that would appear on later albums he did. There's one song I'm unsure of, but for some reason it has the title "First Class Ticket." If anyone knows if that's the real name of that song, or what the real name is, please let me know. 

By the way, 14 years before the release of his first album using the name "Keb Mo," he put out an album under his birth name, Kevin Moore. This was before he really got into the blues, and the style was different, I understand. Interestingly, two of the songs here come from that album, "Rainmaker" and "Anybody Seen My Girl." He put a different version of the latter song on his 1994 album, and redid the first one on another album as well.

The sound quality of this show is excellent, and has to be a soundboard. If you like the sound of his 1994 album, you could almost thing of this as a super-sized all-acoustic version. As I usually do, I put the banter between songs on their own tracks. In a few cases, I removed some boring bits between songs, pretty much all guitar tuning or a DJ talking during encore breaks. Other than that, I didn't change anything.

01 talk (Keb Mo)
02 Grandma's Hands (Keb Mo)
03 Kind Hearted Woman Blues (Keb Mo)
04 Angelina (Keb Mo)
05 talk (Keb Mo)
06 Death Letter (Keb Mo)
07 talk (Keb Mo)
08 Love Blues (Keb Mo)
09 Tell Everybody I Know (Keb Mo)
10 Dirty, Low Down and Bad (Keb Mo)
11 talk (Keb Mo)
12 Am I Wrong (Keb Mo)
13 talk (Keb Mo)
14 Rainmaker (Keb Mo)
15 City Boy (Keb Mo)
16 She Just Wants to Dance (Keb Mo)
17 talk (Keb Mo)
18 Anybody Seen My Girl (Keb Mo)
19 talk (Keb Mo)
20 Perpetual Blues Machine (Keb Mo)
21 talk (Keb Mo)
22 Every Morning (Keb Mo)
23 talk (Keb Mo)
24 Victims of Comfort (Keb Mo)
25 talk (Keb Mo)
26 Take It Away (Keb Mo)
27 talk (Keb Mo)
28 First Class Ticket (Keb Mo)
29 talk (Keb Mo)
30 America, the Beautiful (Keb Mo)
31 talk (Keb Mo)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15260582/KebM_1995_MemphisBrandGrillRichmndVA__6-21-1995_atse.zip.html

I couldn't find a cover art photo for the exact concert in question. But at least this one comes from a concert in Chicago held the same month, June 1995.

Various Artists - Big Night at the Museum, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, TN, 10-28-2020

The other day, I was looking for something Lucinda Williams did, and luckily stumbled upon this interesting concert from a couple of weeks ago (as I write this in November 2020). It's kind of an odd duck, but I really like it. Basically, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee put on a concert to help raise funds for them to keep going during the coronavirus pandemic. It's not exactly a home concert, because they got a bunch of famous country musicians to come to their museum and play music inside it. But there was no audience at all. Instead, the musicians went to various exhibits and played on the actual musical instruments played by country music greats like Jimmy Rodgers and Johnny Cash.

The key, for me, since I really like acoustic music, is that all the performances are solo acoustic. That's very rare for country music these days, but very much needed, since IMHO country music has suffered from bad production for a long time now. Stripping these songs way back, you get the raw essence of the music.

The show this came from was an hour and a half long. More than half of it was filled with talking. A lot of that was promoting the museum and asking for donations. A bit of it was more interesting, with the musicians sometimes talking about their influences and their feelings about playing the instruments once played by their musical heroes. But I cut all that out, since I think this has much greater replay value if it's all music and no talking. As a result, it's only 42 minutes long. That's not much for a show that was an hour and an half, but it's a good length for a typical album.

Even if you're not much of a country music fan, I highly recommend you check it out. Due to its all acoustic nature, it's more like a bunch of singer songwriters who all happen to work in the country genre. And by the way, if you want to catch all the talking parts between songs, I recommend you watch the full show, which is available on YouTube.

01 Buckaroo [Instrumental] (Brad Paisley & Dan Tyminski)
02 That's the Way the World Goes 'Round (Miranda Lambert)
03 Lovin' Arms (Keb Mo)
04 Don't Close Your Eyes (Tim McGraw)
05 Love Hurts (Emmylou Harris & Rodnew Crowell)
06 Heavy Traffic Ahead (Ricky Scaggs with Marty Stuart & Alison Brown)
07 Sweet Dreams (Reba McEntire)
08 I Still Miss Someone (Lucinda Williams)
09 Three Wooden Crosses (Kane Brown)
10 She Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Rodney Crowell)
11 You're Lookin' at Country (Ashley McBryde)
12 I Can't Stop Loving You (War and Treaty)
13 Will the Circle Be Unbroken (Carlene Carter & Marty Stuart)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15832939/BigNghtatMseumCountryMsicHallFmeMuseumNshvilleTN__10-28-2020_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I took a screenshot at the start of the YouTube video that showed the name of the concert.

Keb Mo - Home Concert, Franklin, TN, 4-4-2020

We can all agree that the coronavirus pandemic is a terrible thing. But it does have one nice silver lining in that lots of musicians are streaming concerts from their homes. A couple of days ago, I posted a home concert from Richard Thompson. Here's another one from Keb Mo. I hope I'll have more concerts like these to post in the near future.

As I mentioned with the Thompson post, if you kind out about home concerts such as these from talented artists, please let me know, because they're easy to miss. Today, I was looking over my musical collection to see which artists I'd like to see play a home concert, and I was disappointed to realize just how many of my favorites have died or retired. :( I need to find some younger musicians who are just as talented as the best of previous generations. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

A Keb Mo home concert is particularly welcome for me because I've had issues with the production on most of his studio albums. He keeps putting out music that  veers towards "adult contemporary," a la James Taylor, when I most enjoy him playing acoustically. So this concert is great, because it's just him and his acoustic guitar, and there's no crowd noise to mar the sound quality. The Richard Thompson home concert unfortunately was recorded at a low streaming rate, but that's not a problem here. Mo recorded this in a music studio, and the sound quality is fantastic.

Actually, there's one snag about the sound quality, and that's the fact that the concert started out with an extremely low volume for the first couple of songs. Happily, that's something I was easily able to fix with a sound editing program. Mo's talking between songs was also unusually quiet, so I boosted the volume there too.

I did some editing between the songs. If he spend some time tuning his guitar, I usually cut that out. I also cut some of his talking that wasn't interesting. For instance, it's not entirely true that Mo was all alone for the concert. His unnamed wife was never seen, but she was apparently in a nearby control room and occasionally gave him some remote feedback. I edited out some of their back and forth that was technical in nature. For the comments from his wife that I kept it, I had to boost the volume a very large amount, since she was barely audible. So you'll hear a lot of hiss the few occasions when she spoke. All in all, I probably only cut out about five minutes from the concert in total.

Virtually all the songs are Keb Mo originals. But this concert took place a day or two after soul legend Bill Withers died, so he did a cover of "Grandma's Hands" in tribute to him.

The concert is 50 minutes long. Here's a link if you want to watch it as well as hear it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5rq9c4uBME

01 talk (Keb Mo)
02 Muddy Water (Keb Mo)
03 talk (Keb Mo)
04 Grandma's Hands (Keb Mo)
05 talk (Keb Mo)
06 Better Man (Keb Mo)
07 talk (Keb Mo)
08 I Remember You (Keb Mo)
09 talk (Keb Mo)
10 Change (Keb Mo)
11 talk (Keb Mo)
12 Life Is Beautiful (Keb Mo)
13 talk (Keb Mo)
14 Woman in Charge (Keb Mo)
15 talk (Keb Mo)
16 Tell Everybody I Know (Keb Mo)
17 talk (Keb Mo)
18 Rita (Keb Mo)
19 talk (Keb Mo)
20 Every Morning (Keb Mo)
21 talk (Keb Mo)
22 She Just Wants to Dance (Keb Mo)
23 talk (Keb Mo)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15429910/KebM_2020_HomeConcrtFranklnTN__4-4-2020_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo is a screenshot I selected from the home concert.

Keb Mo - Whittington Park, Greenwood, MS, 5-7-2011

I'm a big fan of Keb Mo's music. (His name is a slang version of his real name Kevin Moore, by the way.) However, I'm not a big fan of most of his albums, because I most enjoy Mo's music when he plays acoustic blues. Unfortunately, after his first couple of albums, his albums have moved in an "adult contemporary" direction, much like later day James Taylor and Bonnie Raitt albums.

That said, Mo is a talented singer, guitarist, and songwriter. Most of the time, he plays concerts with a full band, so the sound isn't that different from his glossy albums. But every now and then he plays a concert in solo acoustic format. He's done that less and less over the years, but this is a rare example of such a concert from the last decade. I'm guessing he was inspired to play solo acoustic because the concert was part of a festival celebrating the 100th birthday of blues legend Robert Johnson, who played solo acoustic on all of his relatively few recordings.

I've chosen this concert out of a bunch of possible concerts to post not only because of the solo acoustic format, but also because of the sound quality. This is an excellent soundboard recording, as good as any official live album. And the performance is top notch too. So what's not to like? The only slight downside is the concert is a bit on the short side, slightly longer than an hour.

01 talk (Keb Mo)
02 Love in Vain (Keb Mo)
03 Rita (Keb Mo)
04 Angelina (Keb Mo)
05 Muddy Water (Keb Mo)
06 Henry (Keb Mo)
07 France (Keb Mo)
08 Tell Everybody I Know (Keb Mo)
09 Kind Hearted Woman Blues (Keb Mo)
10 Government Cheese (Keb Mo)
11 Suitcase (Keb Mo)
12 Shave Yo' Legs (Keb Mo)
13 talk (Keb Mo)
14 Loola Loo (Keb Mo)
15 talk (Keb Mo)
16 Whole 'Nutha Thang (Keb Mo)
17 All She Wants to Do Is Dance (Keb Mo)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15260579/KebM_2011_WhittingtnParkGreenwoodMS__5-7-2011_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I'm happy to say that I was able to find an actual photo of Keb Mo in the concert that makes up this album.