paul.gray | All About Blues Music

Black History Month Tutorial

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Ali Farka Toure

A Blues Legend from Mali? If the east African nation of Mali seems like an unlikely place for the the rich tradition of the blues to flourish, it’s probably because you haven’t heard the music of Ali Farka Toure. One quick sample of Toure’s unmistakable sound will undoubtedly persuade the uninitiated. Blues Beginnings Although international…

Ian Siegal

You could say that Ian Siegal came to the blues via an unusual path. He didn’t grow up the son of a sharecropper on a dusty farm in the Delta of Mississippi. Indeed for a man whose music is so enthusiastically fuelled by such American idioms as folk and the blues, the British-born Siegal actually…

Black History Month Quiz

Marcus Bonfanti

At first glance, Marcus Bonfanti seems to embody the time-honored archetype of the British rock and roll wild man. Raggedly coifed, lazily dressed, blessed with an intense stare that could frighten away a rattlesnake. If he were a few decades older, you could believe he was the love child of Janis Joplin and John Bonham.…

Jarekus Singleton

Blues guitar iconoclast Jarekus Singleton’s is fast becoming a sensation. His name is being as highly praised as it is difficult to pronounce. As with any fresh voice on the blues scene, an exposure to his music provokes endless curiosity about the story behind the voice. And in Singleton’s case, the story is riddled with…

Kirk Fletcher

Kirk Fletcher is not the first blues guitar master whose early musical tutelage came through gospel music. But when the eight-year-old Kirk picked up his first guitar in his father’s church, he was – however unwittingly – following a time honored tradition of the blues. For many musicians growing up in the south, gospel music…

The Royal Southern Brotherhood

New Orleans, Louisiana is often called the birthplace of the blues. It’s a claim disputed by a few music historians. But if nothing else, the Big Easy deserves a kind word for giving birth to The Royal Southern Brotherhood. The project began in 2011 as a germ in the mind of Reuben Williams, manager to…

Beth Hart

Today’s blues singers are often saddled with the unfortunate title of ‘pretenders to the throne,’ which is to say it is presumed they didn’t earn their blues the old-fashioned way, paying their dues with decades of harsh, itinerant lives, picking cotton, eking out meager livings and enduring an endless barrage of abuse. Barely in her…

Aynsley Lister

With a propulsive drive that seems to erupt directly from a wounded soul, Aynsley Lister’s scorching guitar work sounds as though it could have come from an itinerant blues master of from ages past eager to escape a life of sharecropping. But as his name would suggest Aynsley is no Delta Bluesman. He’s one of…