Search Me! (A Bit of Organ Curiosity!)

NaBloPoMo Day 14!

Woo hoo! Miss Music Nerd officially passed the 5000-hit mark a coupla weeks ago, and is now closing in on 6000! So I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who has stumbled upon my little corner of cyberspace. I hope you’ll keep coming back, and tell your friends! 🙂

And, um, not to get all cyberstalker on y’all, but I sometimes get a kick out of looking at the search terms and phrases that bring people here. Vee have vays of tracking these things, you see — but don’t worry, it’s fairly anonymous — search terms aren’t paired with IP addresses… yet! 😈

Anyway, back in March after I posted about the technicologically specialized and supercute shoes I wear to play the organ pedals, a few search showed up in the stats that had to do with playing the organ pedals. Specifically, women playing the pedals. More specifically, women playing organ pedals barefoot. It seems there’s a whole world of fetishism out there that I was completely unaware of! 😯

Suddenly, I felt a bit like a musical Carrie Bradshaw. I couldn’t help wondering:

BTW, if there are any newspaper editors out there looking for a columnist, I’m available! 😀

(p.s. — I personally am looking forward to the release of this movie. Mock me all you want, I don’t care! 😛 )

Now, if you’re interested, you can search around on YouTube for other videos relating to this topic. I’m not here to judge. 😉 But I did the Google search myself, just to see if there was something more, um, directly musical going on here than I was aware of.

Turns out, there is a jazz organist who’s famous for playing barefoot. Her name is Rhoda Scott, and she’ll rock your world. You can hear some audio clips at her official website — click on “Discography.” Meanwhile, here’s a groovy video:

I’m really impressed with her pedaling; she doesn’t just play a simple root-of-each-chord thing — she plays a bona fide walking bass line. And she does it with one foot, while the other foot works the expression pedal (which controls the dynamics of what her hands are playing). On a church organ, you have both feet available for playing complex bass lines, so it’s a little easier (well, maybe it’s more accurate to say that it gives composers an excuse to write harder organ parts! 😉 )

So there you go. You learn from me, I learn from you. It’s a good deal! 😀