Guitar | All About Blues Music

JESSIE MAE HEMPHILL

Jessie Mae Hemphill played the primitive Blues of the hill country of North Mississippi, east of the Delta. Typical of the district, her music has the evocative one-chord boogie beat that is so insistent it seems to penetrate the listener like a virus, resulting in foot-tapping, body swaying and eventually full-on juke dancing. Juke-joints are…

T-MODEL FORD

T-Model Ford played a raw, primitive juke-joint boogie guitar with usually just a drummer for company, as he sang his songs of hard times, violence and bad women. An extremely late starter, T-Model was getting on towards 80 years old when he cut his first album, but his powerful and full-hearted renditions of classic Blues…

SEASICK STEVE

Watching Jools Holland’s ‘Hootenanny’ on New Years Eve is something of a tradition among British Jazz and Blues fans of a certain age. At millions of parties it burbles away on the TV in the corner, waiting for Jools to count down to Midnight, but in 2006 a man came on the Hootenanny and immediately…

JOHNNY LAWS

For nearly 50 years Johnny Laws has been playing the Blues around the Southside clubs in Chicago and, apart from a couple of excellent albums in the 90s, he has never caused much of a stir outside his own community. That’s a shame because Johnny has a great voice: his passionate falsetto and smooth delivery…

DAVE VAN RONK

Guitarist Dave Van Ronk was a leading light of the Folk/Blues revival movement centred on Greenwich Village in the early 60s. With a deft fingerpicking style, a rough voice and a devilish way with a lyric, Dave was a popular act around New York, but showed little interest in becoming a star, preferring to explore…

JEFF BECK

Jeff Beck was a young session guitarist who was taken up by one of the leading bands of the British Blues Boom and, when he went solo, went on to produce ‘Truth’, one of the most influential albums of his generation. Joe Bonamassa, every single Hard-Rock power-trio and the entire Heavy Metal genre took something…

CAL GREEN

Texan Cal Green was a talented and versatile guitarist who started out imitating his favourite local Blues players, then got a gig playing with one of the biggest R&B acts of the 50s, co-wrote a worldwide hit, then switched to Jazz in the 60s but returned to the Blues in later life. Cal was born…

ARTHUR GUNTER

Born in Nashville TN in 1926, the young Arthur Gunter would hang around Ernie Young’s Record Mart store in his spare time. Ernie was to go on to start another business, forming the Excello label in 1952, as a subsidiary to the Gospel label, Nashboro. Arthur had started out singing Gospel with his brothers and…

TAJ MAHAL

Taj Mahal was never going to be a Blues purist, but on the other hand just about everything he plays is deeply rooted in the Blues. Music from the East, West, North and South has been absorbed and incorporated in Taj’s work from the earliest days, and he continues to cross musical boundaries like a…

LARRY JOHNSON

Larry Johnson is a Piedmont guitarist who incorporated many elements of Blues styles from all over the South into his playing. Learning from some of the old originators, Larry was a man out of time when the Blues went electric and his fine interpretations of country Blues classics have been largely overlooked. Larry was born…