The best-selling R&B record of 1953, “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” (Atlantic 986) racked up over 400,000 sales, according to Billboard magazine. The third of five Ruth Brown No. 1 R&B hits, “Mama, He Treats Your [...]
Big Boy Crudup’s “That’s All Right,” an infectious down-home jump often called “That’s All Right Mama,” was a historic record not only for Crudup but for Elvis Presley. Recorded on September 6, 1946 in Chicago [...]
The oft-recorded Richard M. Jones composition “Trouble In Mind” was first waxed in 1924 by Thelma La Vizzo, but it was Bertha “Chippie” Hill who made the classic version in Chicago on February 23, 1926 (OKeh 8312) [...]
Aretha Franklin was hailed for decades as the Queen of Soul, but in her time many also viewed her as the Queen of the Blues. To many more her gospel fervor, striking intimacy, vocal range, [...]
Booker T. & the MG's delineated the soulful sound of Memphis playing behind a host of stars at Stax Records, all the while making instrumental hits of their own. Their first record, “Green Onions,” inducted [...]
Count Basie led “The Band That Plays the Blues,” and indeed his band did in its own swinging style for decades, propelling one of the major movements in American music. Long heralded as a giant [...]
Ida Cox was touted as the “Uncrowned Queen of the Blues” right from the start of her recording career with the Paramount label in 1923, and before long the crown was bestowed in her ads [...]
Pee Wee Crayton was one of the brightest stars on the West Coast blues horizon when his 1948 recording of “Blues After Hours” reached No. 1 on Billboard magazine’s chart for “race records” (renamed “rhythm [...]
Moe Asch ranks as one of the preeminent figures in the history of folk music, including folk blues, thanks to his tireless work in releasing over 2000 albums on Folkways Records in addition to earlier [...]
Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942, by JohnW. Work, Lewis Wade Jones, and Samuel C. Adams, Jr.; Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov, Editors Alan Lomax’s Land Where the [...]