Big Maybelle, one of the most powerful and expressive blues vocalists of the 1950s, led a life that was, as a sticker on one of her albums advertised, “One part triumph, two parts tragedy.” In [...]

Big Joe Turner, the quintessential shouter of the blues, crossed many boundaries with his spirited, free-swinging vocal excursions. He was a king of the jump blues genre, a boogie woogie belter, progenitor of rhythm & [...]

One of the few blues queens of the prewar vaudeville era to enjoy a new round of celebrity in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, Sippie Wallace began her recording career in 1923. Billed as the [...]

Dinah Washington enjoyed great renown in her later years for her ballad singing and jazz stylings, as well as for her catchy pop/R&B duets with Brook Benton, but in her day she was hailed as [...]

No performer embodied the spirit of New Orleans more than Henry Roeland Byrd, better known as Professor Longhair. His lasting influence on the Crescent City scene belies the fact that he often struggled to make [...]

One of the most popular and powerful singers to contribute to the birth of 1940s rhythm & blues, Wynonie Harris achieved his greatest hits by rocking long and hard or by making his listeners laugh [...]

Big Bill Broonzy was the royal ambassador of the blues in his day, setting a precedent for the expansive pathways later charted by B.B. King. Broonzy was one of the most prolific recording artists of [...]

When the Blues Hall of Fame conducted balloting for the first group of inductees in 1980, Muddy Waters received more votes than any other artist. The kingpin of Chicago blues during its glory days, Muddy [...]

David "Honeyboy" Edwards defied the odds by only increasing his stature as a performer as he aged into his nineties with his skills and charms still intact. Both as a singer-guitarist and an oral history [...]

Johnny Winter burst on the national scene with a barrage of guitar pyrotechnics during a period when blues was super-hip to the rock 'n' roll crowd and staked his claim to fame with his first [...]