Blues Music History

BOOM, BOOM. BRITISH BLUES

In 1962, four guys from Liverpool were playing R&B tunes in the Star Club and the Indira Club on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg’s red light district. They played mostly covers of black American music they had copied from records brought back from the USA by merchant sailors returning to Liverpool. They adapted and incorporated this…

AMERICAN EXPORTS

British audiences in the 50’s didn’t have much exposure to the Blues. During the 30s, some dance bands had played jazz and swing-based repertoire, but when American servicemen came to London in 1944, the clubs around ‘Rainbow Corner’ in the West-End were suddenly bouncing to the sound of ‘jump-Blues’. For the first time Young Brits…

RECORDING THE BLUES

“Thank God for recording. It’s the best thing that’s happened to us since writing” Keith Richards. ‘Life’ C.2010. Keef was right. Recording is a paradigm shift on a parallel with the rise of literacy. Before recording, music was only available to those within earshot of the musicians. Troubadours would carry their tunes around the region,…

THE DEATH OF BESSIE SMITH

It is 3a.m. in the middle of a sultry, moonless Saturday night in late September 1937. A Packard car is cruising south down Highway 61 in Coahoma County, Mississippi. At the wheel is Richard Morgan, a well-known Chicago club owner and ex-bootlegger: the passenger is his girlfriend Bessie Smith. She is still a star of…

MEMPHIS

Memphis gave birth to Rock’n’roll in the 50’s and in the 70’s it was known as Soulsville USA, but before WWII, Memphis was the centre of the Blues world. Situated on the Mississippi river, just above the Delta, it was a port and a railhead as well as a rich cotton town, which made it…

THE THREE KINGS OF BLUES

While they didn’t establish the genre B.B., Albert and Freddie King are without a doubt the biggest names in Blues, and while they are no longer with us today their influence continues to be felt to this day. But are the Three Kings of Blues all related to each other? You’d be surprised to found…

PIEDMONT BLUES

Blind Blake To most people the term ‘East Coast’ conjures up sophisticated images of New York, Washington or New England, but the Blues has its roots in the warmer soil further south where the tobacco grows. The respected Blues writer Bruce Bastin coined the phrase Piedmont Blues to describe the music from the coastal plain…

LONESOME WHISTLE- THE BLUES HARP

The harmonica was invented in 1829 by Charles Wheatstone, who called his instrument the Aeolina. It was commercially developed in Germany in the 1850s by the Hohner Company, which still dominates production today. It is known in the UK as the ‘mouth-organ’ or colloquially the ‘gob iron’, but in the USA it is called the…

DELTA BLUES

The Mississippi Delta is the fertile alluvial plain that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers in the north-west of the State. Highway 61 runs from Memphis to Vicksburg through the heart of the land. The rich soil needs little irrigation, and the farms and plantations produce cotton, corn and a myriad other crops. In…

THE ORIGINS OF BLUES MUSIC

Out of the Delta The story of Blues Music began in northwestern Mississippi in the late 1800’s. It was initially a folk music popular among former slaves living in the Mississippi Delta, the flat plain between the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers. With the Great Migration of black workers that began around that time the Blues…