Blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield’s part in the blooming of Bob Dylan and how Bob went electric way before 1965. To folk music fans of yesteryear, this is going to sound like sacrilege; so please excuse me. But I loved it when Bob Dylan went electric. It brought him out of that touchy-feely folky scene and into the…

The Move in 1968: L to R: Bev Bevan, Carl Wayne, Roy Wood. Front: Trevor Burton The Move, one of the great English rock bands of the 1960s, spawned Jeff Lynn of the Travelling Wilburys and ELO (Electric Light Orchestra); and Roy Wood co-founder of ELO and Wizzard, just to name two of their illustrious members who went…

The minuscule YZ of blues. The final two letters of the AMERICA’S Gift index, plus some numbers.    A Ziegfeld girl   Why is AMERICA’S Gift’s YZ index so brief?  It goes to show just how few people, places and songs, in the blues lexicon, begin with Y or Z. Virginia Liston’s raunchy old blues song ‘You’ve Got The…

  I certainly didn’t – until I researched AMERICA’s Gift. What I found amazed me so much, I had to share it If I had a buck for everyone who told me they’d like my two blues eBooks turned into a ‘proper printed book’, I’d have … well, about 70 bucks. This wouldn’t make me rich,…

  America’s Gift’s VW Index. Where the figures aren’t fudged.  As you might expect, the entertainment genre, ‘vaudeville’, features on many pages in the book because that’s where most entertainers playing prototype blues in the early twentieth century were performing. You’ll see Muddy Waters gets quite a few mentions, too, even though AMERICA’S Gift doesn’t reinvent the…