Both nights were full of performers citing dates and reminiscing over recording sessions and regional hits and misses. McCain, the Alabama bluesman, introduced one song by saying that when he recorded it in 1959, his manager hadn’t gotten it played on radio stations. Then the Fabulous Thunderbirds recorded the song, She’s Tuff, in 1977: “Worldwide hit,” McCain said with a shrug.
Jackson noted that her song Fujiyama Mama, which cites Nagasaki and Hiroshima and vows, “I can cause destruction just like the atom bomb,” was a No.1 hit not in the US but in Japan. “I don’t think they really understood the lyrics,” she said with a smile. She drew a huge response for Funnel of Love — an old B-side that, she said, collectors had urged her to perform onstage.
The Stomp also celebrates sidemen: the studio musicians behind memorable licks and solos. Dennis Coffey, the guitarist who psychedelicized Temptations songs like Cloud Nine, revealed the makings of his jittery wah-wah funk: nearly constant tremolo strumming and twitchy improvisations that make every note palpitate with syncopation.
Herbert Hardesty, the saxophonist who was a mainstay on Fats Domino’s recordings, sat in with many performers on both nights, showing his jazz leanings.
One key to the Ponderosa Stomp is its backup bands, enthusiastic students of the songs and musicians they join onstage. Along with the A-Bones, it had Deke Dickerson and the Ecco-Fonics as rockabilly and country specialists and the Bo-Keys for funk and soul. The guitarist Lil’ Buck Sinegal and the Topcats had Buckwheat Zydeco sitting in on Wednesday night as they steamed through New Orleans funk and R ’n’ B for the singer Robert Parker.
There’s something wistful about the Ponderosa Stomp, with so many performers whose early triumphs were fleeting, and some whose voices haven’t been treated well by time. But more often, there’s exhilaration, a chance to prove that for many of the musicians, the spirit in their songs has long outlasted their youth. L.C. Ulmer, a bluesman from Mississippi born in 1928, played eerie, droning, irregular rural-style solo blues, now electrified. At one point he was joined onstage by three women in burlesque costumes, shimmying by his side. He finished the song exultantly: “I feel like I’m 16 again!”
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