The Boil Weevil songs

Remix contest!

Winners will be announced on Christmas Day, 2013 and appear 
on free digital download extended play compilation curated by Terbo Ted.  

Contest rules: 
1. Download the stems here: http://terboted.com/songs/bollweevil/
2. Create a new rendition
3. Upload a free download of your version anywhere online
4. Email track location to terboted@gmail.com

Void where prohibited.  Offer not valid in all areas.


Boll Weevil (traditional)

Chords:  D (bassline D-A repeat), turnaround in A (bassline A-E)

140 BPM

This song's about the Boll Weevil
From Mexico they say
Cotton eatin' beetle 
Came to Texas one day
Lookin' for a home
Lookin' for a home

First time I saw the Boll Weevil
He was sittin' in the square
Next time I saw the Boll Weevil
He had his whole family there
He's lookin' for a home
Lookin' for a home

Farmer took the Boll Weevil
Put him on the red hot sand
Boll Weevil told the farmer
I can take I'm a man
I found my home
I found my home

Farmer took the Boll Weevil
Put him on a block of ice
Boll Weevil told the farmer
It's really really nice
I found my home
I found my home

If anybody should axe you
Who went and sang this song
Say a guitar player from Oakland
Who got the chords all wrong
He's lookin' for a home
He's lookin' for a home
He's found a home
He's found a home






FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(Thanksgiving Day 2013, Oakland, California)

By Fuzzy Baker.

Bay Area rave and internet pioneer Terbo Ted has dropped his first speedbass track in over a decade, with a surprise free download for the Thanksgiving weekend appearing on his soundcloud profile. Billed as 'Terbo Ted's Cyberbilly Speedbass Revue 2014', the track, 'Boll Weevil' has all of the inimitable trappings of the '99 era which took Terbo to gigs on four continents.  Clocking in at a mere one minute and five seconds, the low-fi novelty song stampedes through a 1920s and 1930s blues tune. Originally made famous by Leadbelly and then later rockabilly icon Eddie Cochran, 'Boll Weevil' will sound eerily familiar to a far-flung yet loyal niche audience who tracked speedbass first hand as it emerged as an underground techno music subgenre on peer to peer file sharing networks in early 1999.  Unlike much of the early songs in this genre, this one is entirely performed by Terbo with no illicit sampling of other artists' material.

link: https://soundcloud.com/terbo

Keeping true to vintage speedbass form, Terbo has announced a remix contest of the track, with the winner being announced on Christmas day, 2013.  Top tracks from the contest will be distributed in an extended play free download collection curated by Terbo himself.  Entry is simple; download the track's isolated audio stems from terboted.com/songs/bollweevil; post a free download of a remix somewhere online; then email Terbo at terboted@gmail.com with the link to the song.

link: http://terboted.com/songs/bollweevil

Terbo has also re-released a free digital download of his 1999 opus 'Rodeo 1', appearing online in full CD-resolution for the first time.  The track, full of 'yee haws', pedal steel guitar samples and a rapid-fire gut-bucket cowboy bassline was the lead track on his limited edition seminal speedbass CD 'Twentieth Century Budget Collectors Series™: Terbo Ted IV: Faster than stink on Shit, 1999 WORLD TOUR', which now sells for $30 or more on eBay.

link: https://soundcloud.com/terbo/terbo-ted-rodeo-1-1999

Terbo has not ruled out a return to public solo performances in 2014.  Known for theatrical alter-egos such as 'SUBCOMMANDER TERBO', the candy raver military dictator character who created and performed military-themed electro, bassline house and dubstep tracks in full costume in 2010, Ted has not taken the stage as a solo musical artist since.  "I've long had this idea of myself as an older fella playing some sort of digital banjo controller onstage, remixing 20th century favorites in an Electric Horseman style light up costume.  We'll see what interest there is me performing or touring this time around," said Terbo via email.

Speedbass was coined in 1998 by Terbo as a kneejerk reaction to the then-relatively-new EDM genres Speed Garage and Drum and Bass.  Inspired by Malcolm McLaren's work with the Sex Pistols, Terbo was able to get international music press as far as Tokyo and New Zealand to cover an unheard of genre of new music, based on cowboy-hat wearing laptop DJS drinking whisky and playing outlaw parties in the American Wild West.  While initially a prank and pure fiction, the story gained traction and soon Terbo and other artists were quickly creating music in this genre.  Known for bass heavy, rapid-fire uptempo songs of extremely short duration- often with country or bluegrass samples woven into the mixes- speedbass was the first known music genre to have laptops and mp3s as the preferred method of performance and distribution.  By its early heyday in 2000, Terbo Ted was running speedbass.com, which was releasing up to a half dozen new speedbass tracks daily, entirely based on a free download model.  By the time Texan governor George W. Bush was inaugurated as United States President the next year, speedbass had gone the way of the tumbleweed and speedbass.com disappeared. Today, speedbass is still followed, performed and composed by small numbers of die hard electronic musicians worldwide, with a site at speedbass.net that archives historical favorites in vintage mp3 form.

link: http://www.speedbass.net/oldschool

The roots of this movement- which emerged as a heroicized fantasy at first- were all too real tracing through Terbo's previous steps in that decade.  Terbo was one of the first DJs to embrace laptops for gigs.  Musically speedbass was not too far off of the Bay Area underground techno scene at that time, where Terbo and others were freely mixing between seemingly disparate musical stylings such as gabber techno, jungle and hip hop.  Also part of the first 'dot com' movement in San Francisco, Ted hand coded a recurring segment on atlasmagazine.com called 'Cyberbilly' which was full of outlandish early web multimedia, and collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in their first inclusion of three websites into their permanent collection in 1997.  As a columnist for Japan's 'Zavtone' magazine in the late 90s, Terbo had also had journalistic street cred as an editor of San Francisco's short lived 'Clublife' magazine.  Before that, Terbo had been the first ever DJ to perform at the then unheard-of 'Burning Man Festival', playing to miles and miles of empty desert dust on a Friday afternoon in 1992.

###

Fuzzy Baker is an amateur music critic fond of food trucks, psychoactive prescription medications and a near-religious avoidance of social media sites such as Facebook, Tumblr or Twitter.  Baker met Terbo while contributing to Clublife magazine over twenty years ago, and has reviewed previous full-length releases by Terbo Ted, including 'Spamming' in 1998 and 'Terbo Ted is Dead' in 2003.

Terbo Ted's Cyberbilly Speedbass Revue 2014 - Boll Weevil

The Complete Collection

Boll Weevil

From 'Follow The Music", the new album by Alice Gerrard.
Available on LP/CD/DL Sept. 30th, 2014 on Tompkins Square
Produced by M.C. Taylor (Hiss Golden Messenger)
Featuring members of Hiss Golden Messenger and Megafaun

"Alice Gerrard has one of those voices that harkens back to the likes of Sara and Maybelle.  She is the real deal with the right stuff and hasn't forgotten where country music came from."
- Emmylou Harris (June, 2014)


"Boll Weevil" by Alice Gerrard

collected & edited by HARRY OSTER
recorded 1937, Angola Penitentiary Louisiana

7.Boll Weevil Blues - Guitar Welch

Enchanted Evergreens

Now that the boll weevil has been eradicated in the United States, the battle against the pest is on near the Mexican border.

07/04/24 - Keeping pressure on the boll weevil

The Presidents of the United States of America - Boll Weevil

Hillbilly Heaven

A minimalist approach to this classic tune.  Recorded on two tracks, my old banjo and and old guitar, with very very old strings testing out a new Apogee Mic on a laptop. 

From Mexico, with Love!

- Frailer Kino
June, 2015

[old time] Boll Weevil - Banjo, guitar.

At Home

The Purple People Eater

The Boll Weevil Song (Rerecorded)

The Unforgettable Voices: 30 Best Of Brook Benton & Bobby Byrd

The Boll Weevil Song

© Copyright-Gregory Hale Jones
Album：Crossing the Willamette
Record Label: Exoteric Music
Greg Hale Jones (1955-2004)http://www.gregjones.com/index.html


Greg Hale Jones-BollWeevil

Written & Recorded by BstMstR, Produced by ZEPO aka instraMENTALZ, Remixed by Ra the Sun God

In 1923 Ma Rainey recorded “Bo-Weavil Blues” and Bessie Smith recorded the number the following year; however, this song was quite different than later versions recorded by southern blues singers during the 1920s and 1930s. The boll weevil was a bug that fed on cotton; it migrated from Mexico to the United States and wreaked havoc on the cotton industry in the South. In 1929 Charley Patton recorded a version and in 1934 Alan Lomax recorded Leadbelly’s version.  The song became a pop hit in 1961 when Brook Benton recorded it. Bobby Bare learned “Boll Weevil” from Tex Ritter, who recorded it and used to sing this song during his show. This version features electric lead guitar from Buddy Miller and his Band of Joy cohorts, Byron House on bass and Marco Giovino on drums.

A compilation of the vocal performances of Bill Ruthenberg, from the US Army Chorus ('62-'64) through radio and TV ads of the early 70's.

The Boil Weevil songs

Randy