Capitol Records made a brief attempt to mine the late 1960s/early '70s blues revival market, releasing albums by James Cotton, Fred McDowell, Guitar Jr. (Lonnie Brooks) and Stu Ramsay & Chicago Slim, none of which [...]
Come On In My Kitchen' was one of several songs from Robert Johnson's first session in 1936 that have come to be regarded as classics, although like most of his other records, it was not [...]
Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues & Rock 'n' Roll, by Peter Guralnick, New York: Outerbrdige & Dienstfrey, 1971. Feel Like Going Home was the first in an impressive line of highly acclaimed books [...]
Out of the many classics recorded by Muddy Waters, 'Long Distance Call' was Muddy's own personal favorite, and understandably so. A sterling performance by Muddy as a singer and slide guitarist with Little Walter on [...]
Clifton Chenier's propulsive bi-lingual blend of rhythm & blues and traditional Creole music set the standard for all who followed the zydeco trail he blazed. His renown was such that not only was he hailed [...]
Though he traveled side by side with some of the most notorious personalities in the blues, including Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2 (Rice Miller), and Little Walter, “Robert Jr.” never fit the wild [...]
One of the most prolific of all blues recording artists, Memphis Slim was never away from the studio for too long after he cut his first records in 1940 for OKeh. Although a sophisticated vocalist [...]
This excellent 1970 compilation was the first of Columbia's five double albums of Smith's incomparable work. Rather than issue her output chronologically, Columbia took the approach of putting Smith's 16 earliest issued sides from 1923 [...]
One of the records that helped define the burgeoning postwar West Coast style of smooth “lounge blues,” “Drifting Blues” stayed on the Billboard “Race Records” chart in 1946. Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers consisted of Moore [...]
More cooperative than competitive in spirit, Showdown! ranks above other blues 'supergroup' sessions in the cohesiveness of the music, as three of the top names in blues of the 1980s shared the spotlight with a [...]