In AC/DC era Australia, a Sydney band called the Ted Mulry Gang recorded a rocking version of a song first published in America in 1917. It’s had many manifestations through the last 100 years – one by Fats Domino around 1958 – but Ted Mulry’s 1976 version of “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” is rock & roll pop…
Open tuning. From Russia with love? Or from Liverpool? If you think blues is purely African American, think again. Influences on the genre come from many countries and many creeds. Take the first two blues guitar recordings ever made, for example, ‘Guitar Blues’ and ‘Guitar Rag’. These seminal instrumentals were recorded in New York in…
Updated August 6th 2019. A couple of posts ago (three years now, actually) I featured the mysterious Delta Blues photographer who goes only by the name Shein Die. Mr or Ms Die alerted me to a branch of blues called Bentonia Blues, named after the town of Bentonia in Mississippi. “It was started by Henry…
Blues on the cusp of rock ‘n’ roll This final Original Chicago Blues film, above, opens on a 1952 electric version of Washboard Sam’s classic ‘Digging My Potatoes’ featuring the superb lead guitar work of Lee Cooper. To read more about Lee Cooper please visit this earlier post below. https://paulmerryblues.com/2014/06/lee-cooper-blast-of-electric-blues.html Then we move…
Oh, the presumption of youth! I recently came across some old press cuttings, including a page written way back in March 1970. That’s exactly 46 years ago. Nearly half a century! As you can see from the photograph, I was but a child. I was pontificating on the state of rock music in England in…
