paul.gray | All About Blues Music

Shemekia Copeland

The way Shemekia Copeland’s soaring voice scorches into a listener’s soul you’d swear you were hearing a vocal talent born to inherit the mantle of blues greatness. And you’d be right. With a father like Texas bluesman Johnny Copeland and a birthplace like Harlem, New York City, this expressive blues-shouter couldn’t have asked for a…

BEN POOLE

If ever a simple Youtube video told you everything you needed to know about a particular up-and coming-artist it is Ben Poole’s unforgettable live rendition of the classic Temptations track “I Know I’m losing You.” Poole’s version announces its sinister mission with a searing riff that cuts as deep as Dennis Edwards’ icy vocals from…

FUJII

When Koichi Fujishima (Fujii) was a boy, in the early sixties, he saw a photo of Sleepy John Estes on a record sleeve. Something in the eyes of that old man as he stared out from the picture, guitar in hand – with a pencil for a capo, lit a small fire in the back…

Rob Mason

Rob Mason spoke to All About Blues Music about his early meetings with some of the great blues musicians. Rob is a British Blues Harp player who has been around since the sixties. He met some of the greatest American Blues legends when they came to play in Britain. The major tours played the big…

AMERICAN EXPORTS

British audiences in the 50’s didn’t have much exposure to the Blues. During the 30s, some dance bands had played jazz and swing-based repertoire, but when American servicemen came to London in 1944, the clubs around ‘Rainbow Corner’ in the West-End were suddenly bouncing to the sound of ‘jump-Blues’. For the first time Young Brits…

MUDDY WATERS

When the legendary musicologist Alan Lomax was travelling through Mississippi in 1941 recording local singers, a farmhand called McKinley Morganfield performed a ‘field holler’ song called ‘I Be’s Troubled’. Morganfield worked as a day labourer on the farms around Clarksdale, where he was raised by his grandmother after his mother had died. He was actually…

THE ORIGINS OF BLUES MUSIC

Out of the Delta The story of Blues Music began in northwestern Mississippi in the late 1800’s. It was initially a folk music popular among former slaves living in the Mississippi Delta, the flat plain between the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers. With the Great Migration of black workers that began around that time the Blues…