MUSIC: Three Tune Tuesday 105 - 3 Songs by Taj Mahal! - (3 Cover Performances!)

Hello everybody on HIVE, and especially the Music Community. My name is Jasper and I'm writing (and singing) to you from Cape Town in South Africa!

This is my 40th week (In a row!) contributing to "Three Tune Tuesday", an initiative started by Hive account@ablaze. It is week 105 overall!

In all of my TTT entries I like to play the songs on guitar (or ukelele in this case!) as well as share the original videos... and I have a newish pattern for "Three Tune Tuesday" where I pick three songs by one of my favourite artists, that has inspired me - as I also write original songs.

This week I would like to pick a wonderful blues artist called Taj Mahal. I grew up with his "Best of..." album playing and it really is a wonderful mixture of all sorts of blues, from country-blues, to reggae-ish blues, to jazzy big-band blues... so it's an absolute rollercoaster of styles which I love!

Let's start with his banger called "Leaving Trunk". I will try add some harmonica, but I don't have the same distortion effect to play it through! Hahaha! Here's the original:

For the next song, the energy changes completely... it sounds like Taj Mahal plays it alone on banjo, but it is still one of my favourites! It is called "Fishin' Blues". I don't have a banjo, but I do have my toddler daughter's ukelele. If I add some prestik (tic-tac) to the bridge, it mutes the brightness of the strings to make it sound a bit closer to a banjo! Hahaha! Here's the original:

Finally, the reason I thought I would do Taj Mahal today! Two weeks ago, the Hive Open Mic theme was "Be Okay", and I thought it would be funny to play the blues, but an unusually happy sounding blues! Taj Mahal has a song that goes "I had the Blues so bad one time it put my face in a permanent frown, but now I'm feeling so much better I could cakewalk (a sort of dancing strut) into town!"... here's the original version:

So that's week 105 done and dusted! I hope you enjoyed the Taj Mahal songs! Which song was your favourite? Did I miss an important one to you?

And so, which artist will I do three covers of next week, for TTT number 106? I hope you tune in to find out and thank you so much for clicking/watching/reading this time!!

▶️ 3Speak