New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2000. This saga of Chess Records and the brothers who ran it, Leonard and Phil, ranks as one of the most probing histories ever written about the independent record business. [...]
The Story of the Blues, by Paul Oliver. London: Penguin, 1969. Reprinted with revisions by author: Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998. Paul Oliver's comprehensive history of the blues became an essential reference work after its [...]
Living Blues magazine, founded by Bruce Iglauer, Jim O'Neal, Amy van Singel, Paul Garon, Diane Allmen, Andre Souffront and Tim Zorn. Chicago, 1970. Living Blues, America's first blues magazine, was created to fill a stateside [...]
Boston, New York and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2002. Memphis author never met Muddy Waters but came up with plenty of material to work with, including a number of interviews done by other researchers [...]
New York: Harper & Row, 1986. While Peter Guralnick established his credentials with his early writings on blues and rock 'n' roll, Sweet Soul Music revealed him to be also be an astute observer and [...]
Matt "Guitar" Murphy only garnered widespread public attention through the 1980 Blues Brothers movie, in which he acted in a scene with Aretha Franklin and played with Jake and Elwood's band, but his laurels in [...]
Lazy Lester, the last surviving member of the colorfully nicknamed South Louisiana blues artists who created the "swamp blues" sound on Excello Records, joins his friend, the late Slim Harpo, in the Blues Hall of [...]
Fifty-two years after his death, Robert Johnson stunned the recording industry when this boxed set of his 1936-37 recordings sold over half a million copies, eventually surpassing a million worldwide. Since Columbia's initial reissues of [...]
Howlin' Wolf's 1960 single 'Spoonful' for Chess Records has become one of the standards of Chicago blues but like many other such songs that are familiar to nearly every blues fan today, it never even [...]
The second landmark live album recorded by B.B. King in Chicago, six years after 'Live at the Regal,' 'Live in Cook County Jail' generated spectacular sales and publicity. It is still the only B.B. King [...]