BLUESMUSE31 UPDATED MARCH 4, 2023. While many blues historians write of the 1890s as the decade blues began, in my book ‘America’s Gift’ and e-Book ‘How Blues Evolved’ (Vol 1), I put a case for the 1890s being simply the second blues watershed before the birth of modern blues. The first blues watershed, I concluded, was in America in the…

Violent Femme, Brian Ritchie, curates MONA FOMA We were recently in Tasmania, that one-time convict isle at the end of the earth that changed its name from Van Diemen’s Land in 1852 in an attempt to whitewash away the stain of its dark history. Today, Tasmania is home to probably the hippest museum in the…

UPDATED 27 July 2017. “Great piece on Alexis Korner. I personally didn’t know he was born in France. You learn something every day!” Paul Corry @thebluesfreak, London, England. 5 February 2014. BLUESMUSE 30 As a young lad, probably too young to drink, if the truth be known, I used to luxuriate in the bath listening to the chocolate-brown tones of Alexis…

UPDATED September 7, 2021. BLUESMUSE29. Until the 1890s, when mail order catalogues made them more affordable and improved roads and rail links made musical instruments more accessible, guitars were mainly a preserve of the American middle classes. Most were much smaller than the guitars we know today, probably because they were mostly played by women. Perhaps that’s why they…

BLUESMUSE28.  How many blues lovers have wondered how this intriguing music of ours first gained its unique sound? As much as I tried, I could never see how the nuances of blues related to the frenetic music of old tribal Africa, no matter how many documentaries and music histories told me it did. About ten years ago,…