“I have visited your blog every day. I’ve got a lot of benefits and increased my knowledge.” John García (@JohnGarciiia. July 2, 2013. UPDATED: October 5, 2021.  BluesMuse 16. A young T-Bone, in his prime Just to show that Chicago wasn’t the only place people were producing breakthrough electric blues in the early 1940s, in…

Updated 13 March 2019   BluesMuse15   As America wound down after World War Two, white Chicago blues pioneer, Lester Melrose, still hadn’t finished tinkering with the development of the blues (see BluesMuse8). Rock ‘n’ roll pioneer, Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup He didn’t know it then, but Lester was busy helping create rock & roll. Albert Ammons, also from Chicago, had…

Updated July 28 2019. Blues Muse 14. Two pioneers of the exhilarating new form of blues that, during the 1930s and 1940s, became the precursor to rhythm & blues, included Louisiana’s Saunders King and Aaron T- Bone Walker from Texas. By the early 1940s, both were working out of California. Saunders King, back then, was billed as the King…

BLUESMUSE13 I’ve been researching to find out what was America’s, and therefore the world’s, third ever rock & roll record release after Albert Ammons in 1936, and then Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson in 1938 (see earlier posts). This suggestion might be a bit more contentious to the purist than my first and second…

A young Big Joe Turner BluesMuse 12  If  Albert Ammon’s ‘Boogie Woogie Stomp’ was the world’s first rock & roll record in 1936, what was the second? Allow me to put forward ‘Roll ‘Em Pete’, another rollicking piano-based boogie woogie, this one released in 1938. The Pete doing the rolling was 34-year old Pete Johnson,…