Posts Tagged ‘Vocals’
ALBERT KING
The eldest of the Three Kings, Albert learned to play the diddley-bow and cigar-box guitar as a kid in Indianola, Mississippi. He was born in 1923 as Albert Nelson, the son of a local preacher who died when Albert was 13, and he started out in gospel groups but, after hearing some Blind Lemon Jefferson…
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When BB King played the Blues, the sound was unmistakeable. Often playing off the beat, with the notes twisted and sustained, his guitar playing had a distinct quality of human speech, in this case the voice of an elegant lady named ‘Lucille’. BB fused a Delta guitar sound with a fluid jazz style (using lots…
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In 1945, Ellas McDaniel was a 16 year-old punk hanging out on the corner of 47th and Langley Avenue in Chicago’s ‘black belt’, playing the Blues with John Lee Hooker‘s young cousin Earl Hooker, who was his class-mate. Working in a grocery store, a meat packing plant, spreading ‘blacktop’ and “anything to make a buck”,…
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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…
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