Blues Music Artists

ELMORE JAMES

Elmore James was a genius of the slide guitar. His influence is heard in the work of almost every post-war bottleneck player, and the source of his inspiration is a classic example of ‘artistic transmission’. The 18-year old Elmore was already an accomplished guitar player gigging around his home area of the southern Delta when…

JOHN LEE HOOKER

The Blues player sits alone, his heavy right shoe stomping out a relentless beat that makes the bottle of Chivas Regal dance on the boards by his feet. He rips out vicious guitar lines full of bitterness and pain, while keeping up a solid, throbbing rhythm. His voice is rich, deep and weatherbeaten, dripping with…

CHARLEY PATTON

Charley Patton liked to put on a show. He could make his guitar sound loud and rough, playing it between his legs and behind his back. He leapt about the stage clowning around, sometimes beating the back of his guitar like a drum. His raw earthy voice reflected his hard living, his heavy drinking and…

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…

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”,…

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…