MickeyV | All About Blues Music

SAM CHARTERS

When Sam Charters was eight years old, he heard Bessie Smith‘s ‘Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out’: it opened his eyes and ears, starting his quest to spread the word about the Blues and black culture in general. Sam’s work as a musicologist, record producer and especially his Grammy winning book, ‘The Country…

AHMET ERTEGUN

As the founder and President of Atlantic Records, Ahmet Ertegun was a powerful force in establishing R&B music in the ‘crossover’ market during the 50s and 60s. A talented producer and songwriter, Ahmet made Atlantic the most exciting and forward looking label of the time, and perhaps his greatest asset was his ability to recognise…

SAM PHILLIPS

Radio engineer Sam Phillips was so convinced of the quality of the musical talent he was hearing around Beale Street in Memphis in the years just after WWII, he was inspired to set up his own recording studio. Some legendary Blues artists made their first records there, including arguably the first ‘Rock’n’Roll’ record. Sam commented…

SYLVESTER WEAVER

Sylvester Weaver was the first man to record a Blues guitar instrumental, and his recordings with Sara Martin in 1923 were the first songs where a Blues singer was accompanied by a single guitar. Sylvester’s work on guitar and banjo were very influential in all kinds of Blues and Country music, but at the age…

TONY JOE WHITE

Tony Joe White is a great singer/songwriter who has penned several classic tunes for big R&B, Soul and Country stars, and his deeply soulful voice took one of his own recordings high in the singles chart. He was one of the first artists to bring electric Swamp Blues to Europe, and his later work has…

JESSIE MAE HEMPHILL

Jessie Mae Hemphill played the primitive Blues of the hill country of North Mississippi, east of the Delta. Typical of the district, her music has the evocative one-chord boogie beat that is so insistent it seems to penetrate the listener like a virus, resulting in foot-tapping, body swaying and eventually full-on juke dancing. Juke-joints are…

BUTTERBEANS and SUSIE

Butterbeans and Susie were a husband and wife double-act who took their vaudeville revue around the Southern circuit and the big cities for many decades. With Susie as the overbearing but frustrated wife and Butterbeans as the inadequate but wise-cracking husband, they combined the hilarity of their skits on domestic life with Blues songs laced…

IAN STEWART

Ian ‘Stu’ Stewart is known as ‘the sixth Rolling Stone’, but in fact he was the first one to answer Brian Jones’s advert in the Melody Maker which was the genesis of the band. Stu played piano with Cyril Davies in Alexis Korner‘s Blues Incorporated, and he knew Brian from when the kid would hang…

T-MODEL FORD

T-Model Ford played a raw, primitive juke-joint boogie guitar with usually just a drummer for company, as he sang his songs of hard times, violence and bad women. An extremely late starter, T-Model was getting on towards 80 years old when he cut his first album, but his powerful and full-hearted renditions of classic Blues…

SEASICK STEVE

Watching Jools Holland’s ‘Hootenanny’ on New Years Eve is something of a tradition among British Jazz and Blues fans of a certain age. At millions of parties it burbles away on the TV in the corner, waiting for Jools to count down to Midnight, but in 2006 a man came on the Hootenanny and immediately…