I dunno about you, but I’m not feeling all that patriotic today as a Confederacy-worshiping minority tries to steer the country back to the past. Nobody should be whistling Dixie any more, but this buoyant tune always puts me in a better mood.
Taj Mahal was born Henry St. Claire Fredericks Jr. The son of a musician, he learned to play several instruments as a child and worked on a dairy farm as a youth. He planned to become a farmer — he’s an ardent supporter of Farm Aid — until he switched to music in college. He started using his stage name around 1960, while he was still a teenager, in honor of Mahatma Gandhi.
By 1971 he had released three albums showcasing his take on the blues when jazz great Howard Johnson, best known for turning the tuba into a respected instrument, approached the genre-spanning Mahal with an idea — touring with a band that included a horn section. It helped that Johnson had already taken pains to arrange horns for several of the songs from the first three albums.
The result was a live double LP, “The Real Thing,” recorded at the Fillmore East in New York in February 1971. In addition to Johnson, who also plays baritone sax and flugelhorn, the backing band included guitarist John Hall, who started the band Orleans the following year, and a horn section that at times included four, count ’em, four tubas.
“Ain’t Gwine Whistle Dixie,” minus the “to,” first appeared on Mahal’s earlier LP “Giant Step” as a slightly-more-than-one-minute fragment, but the live version stretches out for longer than eight minutes of spirited solos — including Taj Mahal on fife — over a gloriously laid-back groove.
