Death Letter,' the mournful masterpiece from Delta Blues master Son House's landmark Columbia LP Father of the Folk Blues, represents blues at its deepest level. House's paean to a departed lover was recorded in Boston [...]
Down and Out Blues was the first LP by Sonny Boy Williamson (No. 2). Chess Records subsidiary label, Checker, released this collection of 1955-58 singles in 1960. Harmonica maestro Williamson (Alex 'Rice' Miller, 1912-1965) recorded [...]
Folklorist Dr. Harry Oster used the tool room of the Louisiana state penitentiary at Angola to record Angola Prisoners' Blues in 1959. Of the three guitar-playing convicts featured on this LP -- Robert "Guitar" Welch, [...]
Texas-born Freddy (or Freddie) King came up on Chicago's West Side blues scene alongside Otis Rush, Magic Sam and Buddy Guy and burst on the national R&B scene with a string of hit singles in [...]
Slide guitar master Robert Nighthawk was one of the first bluesmen to achieve regional stardom in the Delta through radio broadcasting. Following on the heels of Sonny Boy Williamson's King Biscuit Time radio show, Nighthawk [...]
The old Yankee Stadium in New York was called “The House That Ruth Built” in tribute to slugger Babe Ruth's accomplishments. Another New York institution, Atlantic Records, later shared the nickname thanks to its own [...]
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Reprint: New York: Da Capo Press, 1987. Musicologist Dr. David Evans drew on his extensive research in south Mississippi and Louisiana dating back to 1965 to discuss the processes [...]
One of the most colorful characters to emerge from the psychedelic 1960s was Dr. John the Night Tripper. The mastermind behind the mystical voodoo funk of the 1968 album Gris Gris was Malcolm John 'Mac' [...]
Eddie 'Guitar Slim' Jones helped drive the electric guitar to new levels of power and intensity during his brief career in the 1950s. Jones was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, on December 10, 1926, according to [...]
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was one of the foremost African-American celebrities of the 1940s and early 1950s, an exhilarating performer with an impressive fingerpicking guitar style. She sang gospel music for most of her career, but [...]