Don Robey built one of the most formidable entertainment empires in the independent music business with his Duke and Peacock labels, Buffalo Booking Agency, Lion Music publishing company, nightclubs, and other associated activities. His hardnosed [...]
Mike Kappus has been the kind of manager and booking agent any musician would want, and the blues world is filled with musicians who wish they could have been represented by The Rosebud Agency. The [...]
The audio artisan who engineered most of New Orleans' great blues and R&B hits from the late 1940s through the 1960s was Cosimo Matassa. Crescent City legends Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, Roy Brown, Guitar Slim, [...]
Henry Glover, a multi-talented producer, arranger, songwriter and trumpeter, was responsible for a multitude of blues and R&B hits of the late 1940s and '50s on King Records and associated labels by Little Willie John, [...]
Dave Clark played many roles during a distinguished career but was best known as 'the dean of black promotion men,' or even 'the dean of black music,' period. Clark once traveled the country looking for [...]
Pervis Spann, "The Blues Man" of Chicago radio, has been a major force in promoting the blues over the past four decades. Spann started as a DJ, promoted concerts at the Regal Theater, co-owned one [...]
Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau promoted concerts of all sorts in Europe beginning in the 1950s, but they left their mark in blues history with the groundbreaking American Folk Blues Festival tours of the '60s. [...]
Doc Pomus was one of the foremost songwriters of rhythm & blues, pop, and rock 'n' roll in the 1950s and '60s, when his resume included hits by Ray Charles, Big Joe Turner, Elvis Presley, [...]
Bob Koester founded America's oldest continuously operated independent record label, Delmark Records, in St. Louis in 1953. Koester's vaunted status in the blues and jazz world came not only from the many historic albums he [...]
Vivian Carter and Jimmy Bracken were the “Vee” and “Jay” in Vee-Jay Records, at one time the largest black-owned record company in the world. Vee-Jay is renowned for its catalog of blues classics by Jimmy [...]