America’s Gift’s index – A, B and C. In case you think America’s Gift is a stodgy old history book, the eBook version has been described as a lightening read, a bit like the Matrix, I’m told. At 11 inches by eight and a half inches and an inch thick, America’s Gift is bigger than your average…

How English convicts from Australia terrorised Gold Rush San Francisco and California. By Paul Merry It’s been two months since my last post, so let me apologise. My excuse is: I’m busy making a film about how English convicts from Australia ran riot in Gold Rush California, between 1849 and 1852. It’s not about historic…

My second last post (a great title for a mournful bugle solo, eh?), promised to tell you about the American guitarist, Helen Louise Ferera, who had a hit with ‘Palakiko Blues’, exactly a century ago, in 1917. The track, a Hawaiian guitar duet with Helen Louise’s husband, Frank, is one of the earliest recordings of…

Every now and again, bands or individuals come along who, you feel, have that special something. The Nashville-based blues-rock band, The Bloody Nerve, is one such act, seemingly on the cusp of a deserved breakthrough, but more about them in later posts. Another super-talented blues-rock artist I’ve been keeping an eye on hails from that…

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…