(Guitar, vocals, 1915–96) Walter Brown McGhee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. He learned to play guitar before his tenth birthday and dropped out of school to play throughout the state in the late 1920s. He met Sonny Terry in 1939 and they joined forces almost immediately. McGhee began recording for OKeh in 1940 and moved to New York. ...
It was Louis Armstrong (or Leadbelly, depending on whom you believe) who came up with the famous final word on the definition of folk music: ‘It’s ALL folk music … I ain’t never heard no horse sing.…’ The quote has been repeated ad nauseam throughout the years, but it has not prevented strenuous debate about the meaning of ...
(Vocal/instrumental group, 1978–present) The W.C. Handy Award-winning duo patterned itself after Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee. Guitarist John ‘Bowling Green’ Cephas (b. 1930) and ‘Harmonica’ Phil Wiggins (b. 1954) met at a jam session in Washington, DC and began performing together in 1978. They toured the globe on a US State Department tour and recorded throughout the 1980s ...
(Piano, vocals, 1910–92) William Thomas Dupree was born in New Orleans. He was raised in the Colored Waifs Home for Boys from infancy. He learned piano at an early age and in the 1920s worked barrelhouses as a soloist, as well as playing with traditional jazz bands. From the early 1930s, he worked as a prizefighter and ...
(Vocals, maracas, c. 1912–84) Frank Raul Grillo was born in Florida of Cuban extraction and took the name Machito in 1940 when his brother-in-law, trumpet player Mario Bauzá, reorganized his year-old band the Afro-Cubans. Their arrangements clothed Cuban melodies and rhythms in jazz harmonies and instrumental voicings. They were highly influential in the emergence of Afro-Cuban jazz (sometimes ...
There was a time during the western-swing revival of the 1970s when it looked as if the pioneering legacy of Milton Brown (1903–36) And His Musical Brownies would be entirely subsumed amid the accolades given to the music’s most popular, enduring figure, Bob Wills. Fortunately, that didn’t happen, though Wills continues to reign supreme in the popular ...
(Harmonica, vocals, 1911–86) Saunders Terrell was born in Greensboro, Georgia and taught himself to play the harmonica at the age of eight. He lost the sight in one eye, aged 10, and the second eye at 16. Terry played mostly in North Carolina from the late 1920s. He teamed up with Blind Boy Fuller in 1934 ...
The Everlys were born into a country music family; Don on 1 February 1937 in Brownie, Kentucky; Phil in Chicago – where father Ike had moved to play in bands with his brothers – on 19 January 1939. The family moved to Shenandoah, Iowa, to a regular slot on a local radio station, and Ike and Margaret’s ...
The 1940s encompassed a wide range of musical art, reflecting extremes of economic hardship and recovery, global war and rebuilding. Empowered by necessarily full-tilt production, US industry recovered from the Depression, though the cream of its youth was siphoned off to fight on distant fronts, and returned to a strange new world. Great Britain suffered air ...
While the Mississippi Delta gave birth to guitar-based acoustic blues, in the area known as the Piedmont region – which stretches along the Atlantic seaboard from Virginia to Florida – a wide range of blues styles flourished, from the backwoods sound of the Appalachian foothills of Virginia to the more urbane sound of big cities such as Atlanta. The ...
Mention of the folk revival is generally applied to the late-1950s and early 1960s, when a new generation of enthusiasts earnestly set about exploring the history of folk music and recreating its passionate, social ideals. There had been other folk revivals throughout history, but they tended to stem from the middle classes in search of a purer identity ...
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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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Classical, Rock, Blues, Jazz, Country and more. Flame Tree has been making encyclopaedias and guides about music for over 20 years. Now Flame Tree Pro brings together a huge canon of carefully curated information on genres, styles, artists and instruments. It's a perfect tool for study, and entertaining too, a great companion to our music books.
David Bowie
Fantastic new, unofficial biography covers
his life, music, art and movies, with a
sweep of incredible photographs.