Posts Tagged ‘Chicago’

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…

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…