Blues Music Artists

JOE BONAMASSA

Joe Bonamassa is taking the Blues to new places, as his songwriting talents blossom and his virtuoso instrumental work explores infinite possibilities of a man and his guitar. Starting out as something of a ‘boy wonder’, Joe has developed into a mature artist who can impress the afficionados, and yet remain accessible to the first…

LITTLE WALTER

Big swooping notes blasted out into the studio when Little Walter’s harp wailed into his closely held microphone, as the band set up to record Muddy Waters ‘Country Boy’ on the July 1951 Chess session. That soulful sound cemented in place a big stone in the foundations of modern Chicago Blues. The huge distorted electric…

BUKKA WHITE

Virtuoso slide guitar playing on his National Steel, his deep, distinctively agile voice, and his talent for improvising songs out of thin air, for hours on end, made Bukka White a prized discovery of the Folk/Blues revival of the sixties. Booker T Washington White was born in the hill country of Mississippi in 1906, the…

PAUL BUTTERFIELD

Nobody knows how a 15-year-old middle class white kid got into the Blues clubs on the South side of Chicago in 1957, but that is where Paul Butterfield met the Blues head-on. He was learning to play the flute at school, but what he heard in those smoky dives inspired him to switch to harmonica…

MA RAINEY

Ma Rainey could make a good claim to be the first Blues singer. Not blessed with good looks, but always dressed to kill, she could belt out a Blues song with power and passion. In 1902, aged about 16, she was touring the South singing in a Minstrel Show with her parents. One evening near…

ALEXIS KORNER

Alexis Korner was an inspirational force in the British Blues Boom of the sixties. As a performer and band leader, he was a pathfinder and mentor for a whole generation of young musicians and as a broadcaster he spread the word about the Blues to the whole British population. In 1928, Alexis was born in…

RORY GALLAGHER

Rory Gallagher was a great front-man for a blues-rock band. His guitar playing, loud, caustic, soulful or delicate, was always a clear and coherent statement, complimented by a distinctive voice capable of raw power and surprising gentleness. Growing up in Cork, the young Rory listened to American music on AFN and copied players like Lead…

ERIC CLAPTON

Eric Clapton became the world’s first rock star guitar hero. The skinny white kid from England learned to play Blues guitar; rode the high wave of 60’s rock revolution; wiped out spectacularly, and gradually earned respect as a lyrical and sensitive interpreter of the music. As an artist who tours and records regularly, and as…

BIG BILL BROONZY

Big Bill Broonzy was a John the Baptist figure in the scripture of the Blues: a charismatic fore-runner of greater things to come. He took the sound of early Chicago Blues Bands out of the Windy City, across the country, and eventually to Europe where he planted a seed that came back in The British…

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…