WILLIE WALKER

Piedmont Blues guitar style, with its jaunty folk and ragtime tunes and quick, elaborate fingerpicking formed the backbone of a lot of music that emerged in the late 20th century. Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller passed away before WWII but their legacy, and the playing of Blind Willie McTell, Rev. Gary Davis and Brownie…

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BABY TATE

Piedmont Blues is not as dark and brooding as its Delta cousin, often featuring delightful ragtime melodies and delicate fingerpicking and tricksy embelishments. There was an upsurge in interest in this style during the Folk/Blues revival of the 60s, with players like Rev. Gary Davis and Josh White filling clubs in New York, but back…

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GUITAR SHORTY 1

There has been more than one Blues player called Guitar Shorty, but something they have in common is a talent for showmanship. Jimi Hendrix‘s brother-in-law is still using that name over on the West-coast for his backflipping, flash-guitar stage act, and others may have used it too, but an older Bluesman with an similar ‘larger-than-life’…

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CEPHAS & WIGGINS

Piedmont Blues is the rather lesser known cousin of Delta Blues, and while the Mississippi players went to Chicago and generated electric Blues, the Piedmont artists gravitated to the New York club scene, inspiring a generation of post-WWII protest singers, including a kid called Bob Dylan, and a whole different kind of music. Cephas and…

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CAROLINA SLIM

Carolina Slim is the best known pseudonym of the enigmatic Edward P Harris. His records were issued under the names Country Paul, Georgia Pine, Jammin’ Jim and Lazy Slim Jim in a short but productive recording career in the early 50s, but he passed away shortly after his 30th birthday. The quality of the work…

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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…

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REV. GARY DAVIS

The Folk/Blues revival of the 50s brought many original Blues players to prominence, from old field hands like Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James, to mad characters like Furry Lewis and hidden treasures like Libba Cotten, but perhaps the most influential of all was Rev. Gary Davis. This gruff old ‘guitar evangelist’ had a fantastic…

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PEG LEG HOWELL

Atlanta guitarist Peg Leg Howell was one of the first Bluesmen ever to make a ‘Race Record‘, and he was also re-discovered in the 60s when he recorded again. Joshua Barnes Howell of Eatonton GA lost a leg in an argument with a shotgun toting brother-in-law, and he turned to music when he found it…

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BUDDY MOSS

Buddy Moss was at the heart of a group of gifted musicians that defined early Piedmont Blues. A harp player who became a leading exponent of fingerstyle guitar, Buddy’s career was interrupted when he went to jail for murder but his greatest problem was his spiky character that made him extremely difficult to work with. Born…

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JORMA KAUKONEN

Jorma Kaukonen is best known as the guitarist with San Francisco based psychedelic band Jefferson Airplane, but he is also an accomplished Piedmont Blues player. Jorma learned fingerpicking guitar in the style of Rev. Gary Davis and accompanied a young Janis Joplin on the campus of Santa Clara University in 1964. A founder member of…

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