MickeyV | All About Blues Music

THE ROLLING STONES

The Rolling Stones are sometimes called the Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the World. They are certainly one of the most enduring. They have re-invented themselves countless times over the decades, embracing many styles and starting a few of their own, but in the beginning they were definitely a Blues Band. Mick and Keith met on…

FREDDIE KING

Freddie Christian was already an accomplished player when he moved from Texas to Chicago as a teenager in 1950. Son of JT Christian, the young man was taught guitar by his mother Ella Mae King and her brother Leon, and he had an eloquent and dextrous style reminiscent of T-Bone Walker, who was a big…

ALBERT KING

The eldest of the Three Kings, Albert learned to play the diddley-bow and cigar-box guitar as a kid in Indianola, Mississippi. He was born in 1923 as Albert Nelson, the son of a local preacher who died when Albert was 13, and he started out in gospel groups but, after hearing some Blind Lemon Jefferson…

B.B.KING

When BB King played the Blues, the sound was unmistakeable. Often playing off the beat, with the notes twisted and sustained, his guitar playing had a distinct quality of human speech, in this case the voice of an elegant lady named ‘Lucille’. BB fused a Delta guitar sound with a fluid jazz style (using lots…

THE THREE KINGS OF BLUES

While they didn’t establish the genre B.B., Albert and Freddie King are without a doubt the biggest names in Blues, and while they are no longer with us today their influence continues to be felt to this day. But are the Three Kings of Blues all related to each other? You’d be surprised to found…

PIEDMONT BLUES

Blind Blake To most people the term ‘East Coast’ conjures up sophisticated images of New York, Washington or New England, but the Blues has its roots in the warmer soil further south where the tobacco grows. The respected Blues writer Bruce Bastin coined the phrase Piedmont Blues to describe the music from the coastal plain…

BO DIDDLEY

In 1945, Ellas McDaniel was a 16 year-old punk hanging out on the corner of 47th and Langley Avenue in Chicago’s ‘black belt’, playing the Blues with John Lee Hooker‘s young cousin Earl Hooker, who was his class-mate. Working in a grocery store, a meat packing plant, spreading ‘blacktop’ and “anything to make a buck”,…

LONESOME WHISTLE- THE BLUES HARP

The harmonica was invented in 1829 by Charles Wheatstone, who called his instrument the Aeolina. It was commercially developed in Germany in the 1850s by the Hohner Company, which still dominates production today. It is known in the UK as the ‘mouth-organ’ or colloquially the ‘gob iron’, but in the USA it is called the…

DELTA BLUES

The Mississippi Delta is the fertile alluvial plain that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers in the north-west of the State. Highway 61 runs from Memphis to Vicksburg through the heart of the land. The rich soil needs little irrigation, and the farms and plantations produce cotton, corn and a myriad other crops. In…