Posts by MickeyV

The New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have ‘invented’ Jazz. That is a very large claim, but the egotistical Jelly Roll was not a man to down-play his own talents. While it is true that Jelly Roll was the first to publish a Jazz tune as sheet music, his assertion that Buddy Bolden…

J.D. Short is in nobody’s Hall of Fame, indeed his name is almost forgotten today, but he was a Blues player of exceptional quality. His clear, bright voice had a distinctive vibrato, but he could wail like a demon, moan like a dying man and suddenly switch to a fluid falsetto. He was an incredibly…

The mandolin is a small member of the lute family, usually having four pairs of strings tuned in unison. While it may be most associated with medieval Italian music, Vivaldi and Mozart would surely fling off their wigs and boogie to the sound of Blues Mandolin played by Yank Rachell and ‘Papa Charlie’ McCoy. A…

We think of early Blues performance as just a guy with a guitar or harp, pouring his heart into a solitary lament, but in reality they mostly performed in pairs, with a ‘second’ guitar propelling the tune while the ‘lead’ instrument played turnarounds and melodic lines. One of the earliest and most successful of these…

Old folks sometimes say that the Blues is dying, but so long as new cohorts of young players are inspired to express themselves through this powerful medium, we have nothing to worry about. Matt Schofield is a young Englishman who has grasped the legacy of the Blues, and like Clapton in the 60s and Stevie…

Some Blues players like BB King and John Lee Hooker made it from the plantation to the world stage, but some other great Blues talents never get heard outside their local district. Earl Bell had all the attributes to make him a star, but he had the misfortune of being born at the wrong time,…