Little Walter: The Daring Stunning Truth of Blues Harmonica On May 12, 1952, a twenty-two-year-old harmonica player walked into Universal Recording Studios in Chicago and cut an instrumental that would change American music. The song was “Juke.” It hit number one on the Billboard R&B chart and stayed there for eight consecutive weeks. However, what […]
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Rory Gallagher: Ireland’s Blues Guitar Warrior Rory Gallagher walked into the Fillmore West in 1970 with a power trio called Taste and a battered Fender Stratocaster that looked like it had been through a war. The San Francisco crowd expected polished British blues. Instead, they got a wiry Irishman who played so hard that sweat
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Lead Belly: King of the Twelve-String Guitar In July 1933, folklorist John Lomax hauled a 300-pound recording machine through the gates of Angola — Louisiana’s most feared prison. He had spent weeks collecting work songs from inmates across the South. However, nothing at those other stops prepared him for what he found in Angola’s Camp
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Charley Patton: The Man Who Made Delta Blues Real On June 14, 1929, a light-skinned man of mixed Black, white, and Cherokee ancestry walked into the Gennett Records studio in Richmond, Indiana. He was roughly five foot five, with a gravelly voice that witnesses claimed could carry five hundred yards without amplification. Yet by the
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Willie Dixon: The Untold Architect of Chicago Blues In January 1954, Willie Dixon handed Muddy Waters a set of lyrics backstage at the Zanzibar Club on Chicago’s South Side. The song opened with a stop-time riff and a boast rooted in Southern hoodoo. Within weeks, “Hoochie Coochie Man” had climbed to #3 on the Billboard
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John Lee Hooker: The Hypnotic King of the Boogie Blues In September 1948, a factory worker walked into a Detroit studio and stomped his foot on a wooden board. In fact, the sound that came out — a droning, one-chord electric boogie driven by that endless stomp — had no match on wax. Subsequently, “Boogie
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16 Modern Blues Artists You Need to Hear Right Now The blues has never stopped evolving. While skeptics periodically declare the genre dead or dying, a wave of modern blues artists is proving otherwise. From Grammy-winning guitar prodigies to soul-drenched vocalists barely old enough to rent a car, today’s blues scene is arguably the most
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Eric Johanson “The Deep And The Dirty” Review Introduction Delving deep into the world of blues rock can be daunting with its wide range of artists to explore. Stepping in to simplify your search is Eric Johanson’s latest album “The Deep And The Dirty”. This blog post will serve as a detailed guide and review,
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