(Guitar, vocals, 1893–1958) A powerful guitarist and prolific composer, Big Bill Broonzy linked the Mississippi delta blues of Robert Johnson with the electrified Chicago sound of Muddy Waters and others. Broonzy was recognized early on by the nascent folk music movement in the 1940s. Underappreciated in America, he gained a wide following in Europe through live performances and made lasting impressions on guitarists like George Harrison and Eric Clapton, who recorded ...
The first great Delta-blues singer, Charley Patton (c. 1887–1934) developed a raw, driving and percussive kind of guitar playing that was a seminal influence on the following generation of Mississippi blues singers, including Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker. All the elements that became integral to the Delta blues – different guitar tunings and picking techniques along with the bottleneck slide – were developed by Patton, ...
(Guitar, vocals, 1913–83) Born McKinley Morgenfield in Mississippi, Muddy Waters was first recorded by musicologist Alan Lomax. Waters’ first recording for Lomax, ‘I Be’s Troubled’, would become his first hit when he recorded it in Chicago as ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’ (1948). By 1951, Waters was on the R&B charts consistently with tunes like ‘Louisiana Blues’, and ‘Long Distance Call’. In 1952, he created the smash ‘She Moves Me’, and later came ...
The hold that the legend of Robert Johnson (1911–38) exerts on the blues is out of all proportion to his career and output. He died relatively unknown at the age of 27 and recorded just 29 songs. But those songs of dreams and nightmares, crossroads and hellhounds revealed a darkness at the heart of Johnson’s blues, expressed with a chilling eloquence that has never been matched. The legend was fostered by the ...
(Guitar, vocals, 1911–38) Despite recording only 29 songs in his short life, bluesman Johnson is an almost mythical figure and one of the most influential guitarists in the history of music. Born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in 1911, Johnson learned guitar from players like Charley Patton and Son House and supported himself on the road from the Mississippi and Arkansas deltas to the big towns of St Louis, Detroit, Chicago, and elsewhere. Johnson’s ...
It was in the rich cotton–producing Delta stretching from Mississippi to Tennessee that black labourers working the plantations gave ferment to an earthy style of music born out of African songs, chants, spirituals and gospel tunes that had been handed down for generations. They called it the blues. The man usually recognized as the first star of Delta country blues is Charley Patton. An acoustic guitarist of impressive facility with a ...
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An extensive music information resource, bringing together the talents and expertise of a wide range of editors and musicologists, including Stanley Sadie, Charles Wilson, Paul Du Noyer, Tony Byworth, Bob Allen, Howard Mandel, Cliff Douse, William Schafer, John Wilson...
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David Bowie
Fantastic new, unofficial biography covers
his life, music, art and movies, with a
sweep of incredible photographs.