This eponymously titled album is known to Howlin' Wolf aficionados as 'the rocking chair album', after the cover photo of an acoustic guitar resting against a rocking chair. But listeners expecting a comfy, quiet set [...]
One of the pioneers of West Coast blues, singer, pianist and songwriter Jimmy McCracklin enjoyed one of the longest recording careers in the blues, lasting from 1945 until 2010. Born James Walker on Aug. 13, [...]
Elmore (Elmo) James ushered in a new era of electric slide guitar with his historic recording of 'Dust My Broom' for Trumpet Records of Jackson, Mississippi, in 1951. It was the only release on the [...]
The colorful persona of Peetie Wheatstraw The Devil's Son-in-Law (The High Sheriff From Hell) belonged to William Bunch, a singer, pianist and guitarist from Ripley, Tennessee. Born on December 21, 1902, Bunch was using the [...]
Texas Flood was the 1958 classic covered for a far wider audience by Stevie Ray Vaughan 25 years later. Larry Davis was already a soulful vocalist in 1958, and would become a powerful guitarist, but [...]
Come On In My Kitchen' was one of several songs from Robert Johnson's first session in 1936 that have come to be regarded as classics, although like most of his other records, it was not [...]
Big Road Blues was one of the most influential recordings of early Mississippi blues, a song many bluesmen learned either from the record or from seeing Crystal Springs blues legend Tommy Johnson in person. 'I [...]
Robert Johnson's 1936 recording of 'Cross Road Blues' has become a central element in the story--real, imagined, or fabricated--of Johnson selling his soul to devil at the crossroads, as depicted on the big screen in [...]
How Long, How Long Blues' was a massive hit in the prewar blues era, a song that every blues singer and piano player had to know, and one that has continued to inspire dozens of [...]
Marion Walter Jacobs revolutionized the way blues harmonica was played with his swooping, amplified attack in the early 1950s. He remains the model to which multitudes of blues harpists aspire; questions continue to circulate about [...]