Nobody knows for sure when slide-guitar playing first slid silkily onto the world’s music scene. The 26-year-old Kentucky blues guitarist, Sylvester Weaver, was first to record slide-guitar blues, as we know it today, using a knife, in New York City, in November 1923. Louisville blues diva Sarah Martin, 38, had chosen her Louisville compatriot to…
I’ve just re-read one of the seminal books on the evolution of rock & roll, 47 years after I first obtained it, so if that doesn’t date me, nothing will. Perhaps I was given it by the author. I simply can’t remember. When I say ‘evolution’, I mean the history of rock music from the…
There’s a bit of a misconception about the first electric guitar blues put on vinyl, with ‘Hittin’ the Bottle’ often being put forward as the earliest. This 1935 track featured the Texan multi-instrumentalist, Eddie Durham, playing his blues-nuanced guitar through a home-made guitar amp for saxophonist and swing bandleader, Jimmy Lunceford. Well, such sources are…
UPDATED November 23 2017 The difference between rock ‘n’ roll and rock & roll (or rock and roll)? For a long time now, it’s been fashionable to describe great rock music as rock & roll. But have you ever wondered when this second era of rock & roll began? And have you noticed the general…
Updated March 2021, on sadly learning of her death. An obituary is below. Who he or she is, I don’t know. They prefer to remain anonymous. But what they’re doing, obviously as a labor of love, is exploring the Mississippi Delta, recording for posterity some of today’s disappearing blues treasures. This mysterious figure goes by…
