MickeyV | All About Blues Music

T-BELLY

Sometimes a band comes along and you wonder where they’ve been all these years. With superb rock-tinged guitar, funky piano and sleazy Blues harp, T-Belly make some fine music, but it is their vocal performance that grabs the ear and engages the spirit. Blues songs can compress deep and complex feelings into a few lines,…

Blues Shouters

The term ‘Blues Shouter’ means something more than the sum of the two individual words. It is true that most Blues Shouters belt out their songs at constant full volume, with very little regard for vocal dynamics. But to really qualify for the title, a performer also has to project a fervour and energy into…

TEXAS BLUES

Texas has long been a fertile source of Blues music, and it continues to uphold that tradition, but there is a difference between the early days and the present. What we know today as ‘Texas Roadhouse Blues’ is typically a boogie-heavy dance music that sprang from a long tradition of live music in bars. Austin…

CAT IRON

William Carradine was born in Garden city LA in 1896, so he was quite an old man when he encountered Fred Ramsay, one of the earliest and most enthusiastic of the young music researchers who travelled the South with their recording equipment, looking for the originators of the Blues. Fred was in Natchez MS in…

JIMMY THACKERY

There are many spectacular guitar players, using many diverse styles and countless hours are spent debating which is best (a pointless exercise as Kenyan, Columbian, Blue Mountain and Black Ivory are all excellent coffees, and which is ‘best’ is just a matter of taste.) Jimmy Thackery has built a long career on his wide-ranging guitar…

AN APPRECIATION OF BB KING

September 1925 – May 2015 In 1925, Riley B King was born in Indianola in the Mississippi Delta, where he grew up listening to Jazz and Blues records on his Aunt Mina’s wind-up Victrola, and singing in the St. John Gospel Choir. He was working in the fields as soon as he was big enough…

NATHAN BEAUREGARD

In 1968 the Blues researcher Bill Barth found singer and guitarist Nathan Beauregard motionless and silent in his run-down room in Memphis, and he was pretty alarmed because he thought he might be talking to a corpse! Nathan was known as ‘The Tutankhamun of the Blues’, because this bald, blind, shrunken old man resembled a…

LUTHER ‘Guitar Junior’ JOHNSON

If the confusion over two harp players using the name Sonny Boy Williamson wasn’t enough, there are THREE Luther Johnsons, all born in the South around the same time, and all play a mean Blues guitar. Lucious Johnson performed as Luther ‘Snake Boy’ Johnson, and was sometimes known as ‘Georgia Boy’ in reference to his…

LAURENCE JONES

“I can’t do an encore- it’s a schoolnight and it’s way past my bed-time!” Baby-faced Laurence Jones might look a bit like a schoolboy, but when he cranks up his Strat, he sounds just like a veteran Blues player and his songwriting has a maturity way beyond his years. With his third album out on…

GOSPEL MUSIC

Dr. Isaac Watts. The roots of Gospel music are buried deep in the 18th Century, when the African culture of slaves in the American South met with the Christian faith of the white population. The Church was keen to save the Souls of the Oppressed, but afraid of any exclusively black assembly becoming a focus…