Vocals | All About Blues Music

JUNIOR KIMBROUGH

David ‘Junior’ Kimbrough was over 60 years of age when he made an impact with his album ‘All Night Long’ in 1992, where his hard-driving juke-joint style showed that down-home country Blues can still rock the room. Junior’s archaic style has the same hypnotic pulse as John Lee Hooker‘s boogies and employs a complex poly-rhythmic…

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…

EARL HOOKER

There are few more accomplished guitar players in the history of the Blues than Earl Hooker. Renowned as a slide player, his clear, eloquent single-string runs didn’t bludgeon the listener, and his use of standard tunings meant he could quickly slip back into using the frets. He mastered new gizmos like the wah-wah pedal and…

SLIM HARPO

Slim Harpo wrote some classic Blues songs that made him Excello Records’ best selling artist and his easy-rolling Swamp Blues was an inspiration for many British bands that brought the Blues to American youth in the 60s. Pounding out his insistent Southern rhythms on guitar and blowing harp in a neck-rack, Slim’s music crossed a…

ISHMON BRACEY

Delta guitarist Ishmon (often spelled Ishman in older sources) only recorded a few tracks, but they were of consistently good quality, using variations on the usual verse structure, and his original 78s are much sought-after rarities today. As a teenager Ishmon was playing guitar on streetcorners, hoping for invitations to play at parties and fish-fries…

CYRIL DAVIES

Cyril Davies was a fine singer and an authentic electric harp player, and a Blues afficionado who did a great deal to foster the British Blues Boom of the early 60s. Cyril learnt guitar and banjo as a kid, but when he heard Little Walter on records, he switched to the harp. He joined Chris…

KIM WILSON

Best known as the frontman, singer and harp player with The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Kim also leads his own band The Blues Revue. Born in Detroit but raised in California, Kim was a Blues disciple as a youth, following and learning from the great original Bluesmen who were still gigging in the 60s and 70s. Kim…

AMOS MILBURN

Pianist and singer Amos Milburn was one of the biggest R&B stars of the post WWII years. His signature tune ‘Chicken Shack Boogie’ went to No.1 in the R&B charts and he repeated the achievement three more times. He had a string of up-tempo hits with drinking songs like ‘One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer’,…

SPECKLED RED

Speckled Red was a boogie-woogie pianist who was a fixture on the club scene in Memphis and St. Louis in the 30s and 40s. His proto-rap ‘The Dirty Dozens’ was a hit in 1929, and he recorded many versions and updates over the years. Rufus Perryman was the birth name of Speckled Red. He and…

ROBERT PETE WILLIAMS

If country Blues is about lamenting a hard life, with poverty, violence, illiteracy, jail-time and betrayal by your woman, then Robert Pete Williams certainly lived that life. Despite being an endlessly inventive guitarist and a desperately soulful singer, Robert was never a big selling artist, but his appearances at Blues Festivals around the world opened…