Guitar | All About Blues Music

IKE TURNER

Years before he met Tina, Ike Turner was a big noise on the Memphis R&B scene. As a bandleader, session musician and talent scout, he was involved in recording BB King, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Johnny Ace and Junior Parker for Sam Phillips‘ Memphis Recording Service, which later became Sun Records, and for the Bihari…

LONNIE DONEGAN

The Scottish singer born Anthony James Donegan was a fan of Blues and Country music, and played guitar around the London clubs in the early 50s. He joined Chris Barber‘s Band as they brought new kinds of American music to Britain, but he was drafted into the Army and sent to Germany where he met…

DAVE MYERS

Dave played his guitar alongside his harp and guitar playing brother Louis in The Aces, one of the most influential backing bands in the classic period of Chicago Blues. The brothers came from Mississippi, where they had played local dates with Robert Nighthawk, Sonny Boy Williamson II and Memphis Minnie. They moved to the Windy…

LOWELL FULSON

Lowell Fulson was a pioneer of West Coast Blues, a laid-back singer who wrote many classic songs and played his smoking guitar lines for a worldwide audience for half a century. He adapted his music for the times, playing hard Blues, Funky Soul and driving R&B, but never compromised his fluid yet penetrating style. Born…

HENRY TOWNSEND

St. Louis was a big Blues town in the 20s and 30s, and Mississippi born Henry was at the epicentre of the scene there. A fine singer, he recorded with his open-tuned slide guitar for Columbia in 1929 and Paramount in 1931. He taught himself to play piano and became one of the city’s most…

WILBERT HARRISON

When Wilbert Harrison left the Navy in 1950, he played calypso guitar and his first recordings for Rockin’ Records had a decidedly country feel. His switch to the Savoy label in 1954 did not bring any hits, but that situation changed in 1959 when his version of Leiber and Stoller’s ‘Kansas City’ was a big…

SONNY TERRY & BROWNIE McGHEE

Blind harp wizard Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, a spectacular guitar picker, had a 35-year-long partnership that helped to define Folk/Blues. Their Piedmont style Blues has a very different feel to Delta Blues and its effect on modern music has a very different genesis to the route through Chicago that gave us Blues-rock. New York…

JO ANN KELLY

Like Memphis Minnie before her, Jo Ann Kelly was the genuine article: a woman who could play the Blues as hard and deep as any man. Her rich, strong voice and authentic acoustic slide guitar work made her a big attraction on the British folk/blues circuit. Usually playing alone and sometimes singing ‘a capella’, she…

SAM COLLINS

Sam was an early Mississippi slide-guitar player who used the fluid qualities of his bottleneck technique, rather than the dramatic, slashing style preferred by some of this contemporaries, to emphasise his light, clear vocal delivery. Born in Louisiana but brought up across the MS state line in Bo Diddley‘s home-town of McComb, he began his…

BIG JOE WILLIAMS

Big Joe Williams was a classic Mississippi Delta Bluesman. This gruff voiced, awkward fellow with his nine-string guitar had played in jug-bands and minstrel shows; he had wandered all over the South ‘riding the blinds’ as a hobo; played for tips on street-corners and juke-joints and then, when he moved to Chicago, wrote some songs that…