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(Vocals, 1894–1937) Bessie Smith was the first blues recording star during the form’s initial heyday in the ‘jazz age’ of the 1920s. A protégé of the great Ma Rainey, Smith and her booming, sorrowful voice took the East Coast by storm in stage shows in the 1920s. Signed to Columbia Records, she scored with ‘Downhearted Blues’, ‘Nobody ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock, general editor Michael Heatley

Bessie Smith was one of the greatest vocalists of the twentieth century; her emotional delivery and exquisite phrasing has been an influence on instrumentalists as well as innumerable singers, both male and female. Many of her records, including ‘Gimmie a Pigfoot’, ‘Woman’s Trouble Blues’, ‘St. Louis Blues’ and the song that became an anthem of the Great Depression, ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz & Blues, founding editor Howard Mandel

Few would deny that the blues has played a more important role in the history of popular culture than any other musical genre. As well as being a complete art form in itself, it is a direct ancestor to the different types of current popular music we know and love today. Without the blues there would have been no Beatles ...

Source: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music, general editor Paul Du Noyer

Joseph Vernon Turner was born on 18 May 1911 in Kansas City, Missouri. He dropped out of school after sixth grade and worked with blind singers on the streets. The blues was in the air in Kansas City and when Turner joined in with the street singers he would make up blues lyrics. Turner was functionally illiterate and never learned ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz & Blues, founding editor Howard Mandel

Billie Holiday was entirely untrained as a singer, but drew on the example of popular recording artists such as Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong in developing her musical approach. She was able to make much of poor songs as well as great ones. Her phrasing, intonation, attention to the weight and nuance of lyrics, and her lightly ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz & Blues, founding editor Howard Mandel

Observers who saw him in his prime have likened the charisma of the ‘king of western swing’ Bob Wills to that of latter-day superstars such as Elvis and The Beatles. The Texas fiddler, with his trademark high-pitched folk hollers and jivey, medicine-show asides, was an irresistible force of nature. Although he was, in the earliest days of ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Music, consultant editor Bob Allen

Clarence Williams was born in 1898 in Plaquemine, Louisiana, migrating to New Orleans in the teens to play piano in the District and begin a long career as a composer, bandleader and musical promoter. He was manager of two early jazz venues – the Big 25 Club and Pete Lala’s Café – hiring the best musicians in the ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz & Blues, founding editor Howard Mandel

(Piano, songwriter, 1888–1989) Born Israel Beilin in Siberia, Berlin’s family relocated in 1893 to New York, where he broke into vaudeville. He published his first song in 1907 and in 1911 had his first major hit with ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’. One of America’s most prolific melodicists, Berlin wrote hundreds of tunes that became standards, including ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz & Blues, founding editor Howard Mandel

(Vocals, 1943–70) Influenced by Bessie Smith, Joplin became a rock star while in San Francisco’s Big Brother & the Holding Company, and enjoyed a meteoric solo career before her untimely death from a heroin overdose in Los Angeles. Nonetheless, she was perhaps the most commanding female blues singer of the modern era. Joplin’s raw emotional expression and ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz & Blues, founding editor Howard Mandel

(Vocals, 1897–1933) Jimmie Rodgers, ‘The Singing Brakeman’, struggled against poor health and the rigours of the road to forge a new American folk music that would influence country music for generations. Rodgers wrote songs like ‘T.B. Blues’, ‘Travelin’ Blues’, ‘Train Whistle Blues’ and his 13 ‘blue yodels’. Rodgers’ voice and inherent honesty attracted legions of listeners. Rodgers developed ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock, general editor Michael Heatley

(Vocals, b. 1919) Born Muriel Deason, in Nashville, Tennessee, Kitty Wells was one of the first women to achieve stardom in country music. Wells began singing in the 1930s with her cousin Bessie Choate as The Deason Sisters. In 1938, she married singer Johnnie Wright, who would later partner with Jack Anglin in the popular ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Music, consultant editor Bob Allen

Vocalist/pianist Leroy Carr’s life and career belie the myth that pre-war acoustic blues artists were necessarily ‘rural’ or ‘primitive’. Carr was born not on a plantation but in Nashville, Tennessee on 27 March 1905. His father worked as a porter at Vanderbilt University. After his parents separated, his mother brought him and his sister to Indianapolis (known in the ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz & Blues, founding editor Howard Mandel

An incomparable figure in the history of jazz, Armstrong played with an unprecedented virtuosity and bravura, while retaining an individual tone and a deceptively laid-back style. In the early 1920s, he shifted the emphasis of jazz from ensemble playing to a soloist’s art form, while setting new standards for trumpeters worldwide. The sheer brilliance of his playing ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz & Blues, founding editor Howard Mandel

Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, the ‘Mother of the Blues’, had been singing the blues for some two decades before she commenced her influential series of recordings for the Paramount label in 1923. She even laid claim to naming the music ‘the blues’ after hearing the singing of a young girl in Missouri in 1902, where Rainey was performing with a ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz & Blues, founding editor Howard Mandel

(Vocals, composer, bandleader, 1889–1975) Sissle worked with bandleader James Reese Europe from 1916–19, before teaming up with Eubie Blake; together Sissle and Blake wrote hits for Sophie Tucker and the successful all-black musicals Shuffle Along (1921) and Chocolate Dandies (1924). Sissle led his own bands in Europe during the late 1920s before returning to America in 1931 ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz & Blues, founding editor Howard Mandel
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