New York: Harper & Row, 1986. While Peter Guralnick established his credentials with his early writings on blues and rock 'n' roll, Sweet Soul Music revealed him to be also be an astute observer and [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Pete Welding, one of America's foremost blues authorities, made major contributions to the documentation of the blues both as a writer and as a record producer. Little of his work as a critic, annotator and [...]
Hound Dog Taylor & the HouseRockers was the album that launched the “Genuine Houserocking Music” phenomenon of Alligator Records in Chicago, and arguably Hound Dog Taylor has yet to be surpassed as the champion of [...]
One of a number of cautionary warnings recorded by the suspicious and distrustful Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller), “Don’t Start Me Talkin’” was his biggest hit on the Billboard R&B charts. Sonny Boy had been [...]
Few singers have ever conveyed the troubles, heartache, and loneliness of the blues with a softer, more elegant touch than Charles Brown, one of the most popular and influential pioneers of postwar blues on the [...]