Blues Music History

FIFE & DRUM MUSIC

Fife and drum music is a branch of country Blues that has survived from the 19th Century in a few remote rural districts of northern Mississippi. With modest home-made instruments and a simple structure, it is neverthless a joyful music, made for dancing and sharing with friends and neighbours, from a time when time itself…

‘FROM SPIRITUALS to SWING’ – JOHN HAMMOND Sr.

In 1938, the ‘Spirituals to Swing’ Concert at Carnegie Hall in New York celebrated the contribution that African-American musicians had made to popular American culture over the previous decades. The Blues had grown up in the South as a folk music which documented the hard life of sharecropping field hands. It remained in the Delta,…

ALAN LOMAX at STOVALL’S PLANTATION

In the summer of 1942, Alan Lomax was travelling through the Mississippi Delta, recording examples of local folk music as part of his job as Assistant Archivist for the Library of Congress. In this work, he was following in the footsteps of his father John A Lomax, and together they contributed a huge catalogue of…

Rev. J M GATES

When the ‘race music‘ industry was getting into its stride in the mid-20s, a surprising number of records were not secular Blues or vaudeville songs, but religious recordings. While the ‘Blues Divas’ and country songsters provided the secular output, the sacred side was dominated by Gospel singers, ‘hell-fire preachers’ and ‘guitar evangelists’. Blind Willie Johnson…

THE EALING CLUB

In 1959, The Ealing Jazz Club was a basement room opposite Ealing Broadway station, and it was reached by descending steep narrow stairs to an alley that leads out into a suburban street. On the left is a doorway that became a portal to the British R&B that re-invigorated the Blues and spread it to…

THE ZOOT SUIT

A Zoot Suit is a baggy, but well tailored, matching jacket and pants. The coat is long and flared, usually reaching down to the knee, with a high waistline, wide lapels, broad padded shoulders and a big pleat in the back. The pants are high-waisted too, but cut extremely generously in the leg before tapering…

RACE MUSIC

Blues, jazz, R&B, funk, rap and hip-hop are all examples of the Black music that helped to shape our culture today, but this music grew and developed in a historical context. From the beginning of the 20th Century, African music’s rhythms and tradition of improvisation have dominated popular music, but in the early days this…

WEST COAST BLUES

California is not the place you expect to find the Blues. It does not reek of the murderous working conditions of Chicago‘s killing floor, the hardscrabble existence of sharecroppers in the Delta, or the relentless dehumanision of production lines in Detroit and a hundred other industrial cities. In fact, the low numbers of Black Americans…

CHICAGO BLUES

The Blues was born in the Delta and grew up on its journey from the country to the city, but the place it came of age was Chicago. When Muddy Waters got off the train from Mississippi in 1942, he soon noticed two things. First, he was going to need an electric guitar turned up…

BLUES AT THE CROSSROADS

The Summer of Love swept a warm wind of change through the music industry in 1967. When the Beatles issued Sargeant Pepper then disappeared to India with their guru, it seems everyone was wafted away in a psychedelic haze. When the acid wore off at the end of the 60s, Rock music was in quite…