This labor of true love was spearheaded by label cofounder/guitar great John Fahey, though tragically he didn't live long enough to see it completed. It's easily one of the most beautiful collections of recorded music [...]
The prolific magazine Blues & Rhythm: The Gospel Truth was founded in London in 1984 by British blues collector and pundit Paul Vernon to provide a complementary but more wide-ranging and timely voice to the [...]
This book by Blues scholar Gayle Dean Wardlow reveals the stories behind the great Blues pioneers, some in their own words. As a Mississippi journalist, Wardlow began searching the Delta in the early 1960s for [...]
Bill Doggett had his own big band in Philadelphia before joining Lucky Millinder in 1940. Doggett played and arranged for the Ink Spots, Illinois Jacquet, Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald before forming his own group [...]
Mississippi Fred McDowell claimed, 'I do not play no Rock 'n' Roll,' but he certainly had an impact on Rock with recordings such as this LP, released in 1970, playing electric guitar with a young, [...]
This was the first song Skip James recorded in 1931 for Paramount Records, and also the first song he sang at his historic Newport Folk Festival performance in 1964. James had just been rediscovered in [...]
Dave Bartholomew was a driving creative force in the history of New Orleans Rhythm & Blues, a man whose name may not be well known to the general public, but whose work as a songwriter, [...]
Though he began his musical career as a drummer, Roy Milton always utilized that sense of swing and rhythm in whatever he played. His 1946 single 'R.M. Blues' for Art Rupe's fledgling Juke Box imprint [...]
Nobody sang 'Hound Dog' better than Big Mama Thornton. The Pop world only knows that in 1956 Elvis Presley gyrated to it. But this Leiber-Stoller song achieved initial fame when Thornton recorded her seminal version [...]
In 1967, a pregnant Etta James traveled to rural Alabama to work with the world-class musicians of Muscle Shoals Studios. Country fiddler Rick Hall, who ran the studio, had the perfect song for James, 'Tell [...]