(Vocal/instrumental group, 1926–35) The Mississippi Sheiks were Lonnie Chatmon (guitar, violin) and Walter Vinson (guitar), sometimes joined by Chatmon’s brothers Sam (guitar, violin) and Armenter (a.k.a. Bo Carter, guitar), as well as Charlie McCoy (banjo, mandolin); the vocals were shared between the group members. Their repertoire blended blues themes with contemporary pop/novelty tunes, ...
(Vocals, guitar, 1892–1966) A songster and fingerpicking guitarist from Avalon, Mississippi, John Hurt excelled in the pre-blues black folk ballad tradition as well as in blues, gospel and dance instrumentals. He spent most of his life working on farms and entertaining at local parties and functions for both blacks and whites. His first opportunity to record ...
(Guitar, vocals, 1904–72) Self-taught as a guitarist, music was only a sideline for McDowell for the first 60 years of his life. He worked in the Memphis area before settling in Como, Mississippi to work as a farmer in 1929; he didn’t own a guitar until 1940. Discovered and recorded by Alan Lomax in 1959, McDowell’s ...
Muddy Waters was without question the creator of the Chicago blues sound, the most important figure in post-war blues and the greatest influence on the British blues movement that followed. The Rolling Stones even went as far as to name themselves after a Muddy song. Muddy’s music blended the downhome essence of Mississippi Delta blues with the sophistication of Chicago’s ...
(Trumpet, cornet, 1894–1971) One of the leading New Orleans cornettists during the 1920s, Ernest ‘Punch’ Miller moved to Chicago in 1926 and found work with fellow New Orleanians Freddie Keppard and Jelly Roll Morton, as well as with Tiny Parham and Albert Wynn’s Gutbucket Five. He spent the 1930s in New York before returning to Chicago. In ...
The 1920s was, without doubt, the Jazz Age. Workers and the newly burgeoning middle class turned into consumers due to relatively higher wages. The international political advantages that came from having just won a major war buttressed a ‘lost generation’ of artistic types, who took up residence in Europe. New moral codes, sophistication and cynicism abounded. Some ...
The most influential country act of 2001 was a band that didn’t even exist. The Soggy Bottom Boys were the prime attraction on O Brother, Where Art Thou ? the soundtrack album that topped the country and pop charts and sold more than four million copies. The group revived the late 1930s and early 1940s sound when old-time string-band music ...
Country music today retains little of the regional identity that characterized it in its early days. There are pockets of resistance to this homogeneity and to the hegemony of Nashville – a honky-tonk dance circuit and a fiercely independent singer-songwriter tradition in Texas, for example – but overall the scene is one of major stars playing huge venues. The middle ...
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 ...
In the nineteenth century, country music belonged to fireside and family, to the frontier town and the backwoods hamlet. Four decades into the twentieth, it was utterly transformed, driven headlong into the new world of the new century. First, fiddlers’ conventions and other public events provided a context of competition and offered the musician the chance ...
In 1949, two apparently small events took place, which in hindsight were to have monumental significance for popular culture. The first of these saw Billboard magazine change the name of its ‘Race Records’ chart to the more relevant and politically correct ‘Rhythm & Blues’ chart, reflecting the success of the American dance music of the moment. Meanwhile, ...
Few blues guitarists had more style and presence than Albert King (1923–92). At 6ft 4in (1.93m) and 250lbs (113kg), he cut an imposing figure onstage. Equally distinctive was his Gibson Flying V guitar, a right-handed instrument that King played left-handed and upside down. This gave him an unusual, tormented sound when he bent the strings on his fretboard. ...
Albert King’s late 1960s and early 1970s recordings for the Stax label remain cornerstones of modern blues. Tunes like ‘Born Under A Bad Sign’, ‘Crosscut Saw’ and ‘I’ll Play the Blues For You’ are also an antidote to the over-the-top playing indulged in by so many contemporary blues guitarists. For King, a six-foot-four, 250-pound man possessed of a big ...
(Guitar, vocals, 1905–74) Arthur William Crudup was born in Forest, Mississippi and did not learn to play the guitar until his 30s. He worked functions in the Clarksdale area before moving to Chicago in 1940, signing with Bluebird in 1941 and finding considerable popularity on record. He returned to Mississippi after the Second World War and worked ...
The bluesman who took the blues into the mainstream, B.B. King (b. 1925) is also its ambassador to the world. His solid, seasoned style is heard internationally. King’s style draws on the Mississippi blues of Elmore James and Muddy Waters, the Chicago blues of Buddy Guy and Magic Sam, and the West-Coast blues of T-Bone Walker ...
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David Bowie
Fantastic new, unofficial biography covers
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