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Running, Jumping, Standing Still - Spider John Koerner & Willie Murphy (1969)
Both Koerner and Murphy had made names for themselves as blues performers, but they joined up with a full band here to make a record full of blues, psych, pop, and rock that has a ton of charm.
There’s a lot of old material woven in here–ragtime, blues, western song, and creole music–but it’s structured into well-built pop songs that grab your attention and keep it.
On the surface it sounds pretty similar to things that would be pretty common at the time: Arlo Guthrie, Harry Nilsson, etc. It keeps its own flavor apart from that, though.
These two wouldn’t make a follow-up, so this is an interesting one-off that really is fun to hear.
