Blues Music Artists

SANDI THOM

Some amazingly talented people never get the chance to get their music heard, because being a great writer or performer means very little if no-one knows your work. Some people get a break by accident or design, but unless they have the talent to follow it through, they will be a one-hit-wonder or a ‘flash…

EARL BELL

Some Blues players like BB King and John Lee Hooker made it from the plantation to the world stage, but some other great Blues talents never get heard outside their local district. Earl Bell had all the attributes to make him a star, but he had the misfortune of being born at the wrong time,…

T-BELLY

Sometimes a band comes along and you wonder where they’ve been all these years. With superb rock-tinged guitar, funky piano and sleazy Blues harp, T-Belly make some fine music, but it is their vocal performance that grabs the ear and engages the spirit. Blues songs can compress deep and complex feelings into a few lines,…

CAT IRON

William Carradine was born in Garden city LA in 1896, so he was quite an old man when he encountered Fred Ramsay, one of the earliest and most enthusiastic of the young music researchers who travelled the South with their recording equipment, looking for the originators of the Blues. Fred was in Natchez MS in…

JIMMY THACKERY

There are many spectacular guitar players, using many diverse styles and countless hours are spent debating which is best (a pointless exercise as Kenyan, Columbian, Blue Mountain and Black Ivory are all excellent coffees, and which is ‘best’ is just a matter of taste.) Jimmy Thackery has built a long career on his wide-ranging guitar…

AN APPRECIATION OF BB KING

September 1925 – May 2015 In 1925, Riley B King was born in Indianola in the Mississippi Delta, where he grew up listening to Jazz and Blues records on his Aunt Mina’s wind-up Victrola, and singing in the St. John Gospel Choir. He was working in the fields as soon as he was big enough…

NATHAN BEAUREGARD

In 1968 the Blues researcher Bill Barth found singer and guitarist Nathan Beauregard motionless and silent in his run-down room in Memphis, and he was pretty alarmed because he thought he might be talking to a corpse! Nathan was known as ‘The Tutankhamun of the Blues’, because this bald, blind, shrunken old man resembled a…

LUTHER ‘Guitar Junior’ JOHNSON

If the confusion over two harp players using the name Sonny Boy Williamson wasn’t enough, there are THREE Luther Johnsons, all born in the South around the same time, and all play a mean Blues guitar. Lucious Johnson performed as Luther ‘Snake Boy’ Johnson, and was sometimes known as ‘Georgia Boy’ in reference to his…

LAURENCE JONES

“I can’t do an encore- it’s a schoolnight and it’s way past my bed-time!” Baby-faced Laurence Jones might look a bit like a schoolboy, but when he cranks up his Strat, he sounds just like a veteran Blues player and his songwriting has a maturity way beyond his years. With his third album out on…

SUGARAY RAYFORD

Sugaray Rayford has been the featured vocalist of the Award-winning Mannish Boys for several years now, and they have again been nominated for three Blues Music Awards in 2015. However Sugaray is the frontman for his own band, and he has also been nominated as Best Traditional Male Artist and as BB King Entertainer of…