Driving Wheel was Little Jr. Parker's first full-length LP, released on the Houston-based Duke label at the height of Parker's popularity in 1962, when he was ranked in the top echelon of blues artists, along [...]
Death Letter,' the mournful masterpiece from Delta Blues master Son House's landmark Columbia LP Father of the Folk Blues, represents blues at its deepest level. House's paean to a departed lover was recorded in Boston [...]
Down and Out Blues was the first LP by Sonny Boy Williamson (No. 2). Chess Records subsidiary label, Checker, released this collection of 1955-58 singles in 1960. Harmonica maestro Williamson (Alex 'Rice' Miller, 1912-1965) recorded [...]
Folklorist Dr. Harry Oster used the tool room of the Louisiana state penitentiary at Angola to record Angola Prisoners' Blues in 1959. Of the three guitar-playing convicts featured on this LP -- Robert "Guitar" Welch, [...]
One of the most colorful characters to emerge from the psychedelic 1960s was Dr. John the Night Tripper. The mastermind behind the mystical voodoo funk of the 1968 album Gris Gris was Malcolm John 'Mac' [...]
Eddie 'Guitar Slim' Jones helped drive the electric guitar to new levels of power and intensity during his brief career in the 1950s. Jones was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, on December 10, 1926, according to [...]
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was one of the foremost African-American celebrities of the 1940s and early 1950s, an exhilarating performer with an impressive fingerpicking guitar style. She sang gospel music for most of her career, but [...]
Arthur N. 'Art' Rupe has left an indelible mark on American music thanks to his recordings of Sam Cooke, Little Richard, Percy Mayfield, Guitar Slim, Roy Milton, Joe Liggins, the Soul Stirrers, and many other [...]
Ahmet Ertegun, a Turkish immigrant with a love for African-American music, co-founded one of America's premier record companies, Atlantic Records, in 1948. Atlantic's earliest success was with Blues and R&B artists such as Ruth Brown, [...]
Three harmonica players from different parts of the country - Glover from Minnesota, Dirks from Chicago, and Gaines from Washington, D.C. - joined forces to pay tribute to their idol in Blues With a Feeling: [...]