Fifty-two years after his death, Robert Johnson stunned the recording industry when this boxed set of his 1936-37 recordings sold over half a million copies, eventually surpassing a million worldwide. Since Columbia's initial reissues of [...]
Bukka White's 1940 session for producer Lester Melrose in Chicago is regarded as one of the pinnacles of blues recording history. The 12 tracks from that two-day session, along with two songs from a 1937 [...]
As a portrait of the down-and-out, street-level life of a junkie in 1958, Blues From the Gutter must have had quite an appeal to the album-buying public of the beat poets' era. Dupree's moods actually [...]
Nehemiah Curtis “Skip” James possessed one of the most hauntingly distinctive styles in the blues, and, according to some who knew him, one of the most disturbed and complex personalities as well. His vocals, guitar [...]
Baby Please Don't Go' has been recorded in many variations under many titles, but most of them can be traced back to the 1935 version by Joe Williams' Washboard Blues Singers, or to Williams' remakes [...]
Statesboro Blues' may be best known as an Allman Brothers electric guitar showcase from their 1971 Fillmore East album, but the original recording by Georgia street musician Blind Willie McTell was a lithe acoustic rendition [...]
London and New York: Quartet Books, 1989. The multifaceted story of Willie Dixon--songwriter, producer, bassist, music publisher, singer, promoter, and more--is told by an equally wide-ranging and impressive cast of musicians (primarily Dixon himself), studio [...]
Even in a blues world populated by colorful and idiosyncratic characters, Big Joe Williams loomed as one of the most inimitable - and irascible. Born to ramble, he left his Crawford, Mississippi, home at age [...]
Delta blues master Johnny Shines was known as 'Little Wolf' in his younger days when he modeled his music after that of Howlin' Wolf, but he came to be primarily associated with his legendary cohort [...]
Father of the Folk Blues, one of the key albums of the folk-blues revival, helped introduced the deepest of the Delta blues singers to a new generation of listeners in the 1960s. House had just [...]