Blues Music Artists

LUCKY MILLINDER

Lucky Millinder had a great stage presence, a good ear for a hot tune, and a knack of making chart topping records. He made those talents go a long way because he didn’t sing or play an instrument, and he couldn’t read music. As a band-leader, however, he put together The Lucky Millinder Orchestra that…

ANDY FAIRWEATHER-LOW

Andy Fairweather-Low has that light but fatally cracked vocal quality that is very simpatico with a Blues tune. The plaintive appeal that radiates from his version of ‘Gin House’ on the first Amen Corner album opened a lot of young ears to the emotional power of the Blues. Andy pursued a successful solo career in…

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…

JOHNNY LAWS

For nearly 50 years Johnny Laws has been playing the Blues around the Southside clubs in Chicago and, apart from a couple of excellent albums in the 90s, he has never caused much of a stir outside his own community. That’s a shame because Johnny has a great voice: his passionate falsetto and smooth delivery…