BLUESMUSE22. TAKE A LISTEN ON THE LINK BELOW Updated and reformatted March 31st 2017 Chuck Berry (God bless him) is one of the finest lyricists known to rock & roll. Chuck also plays inimitable, dynamic, guitar-driven old-school rhythm & blues. Except Chuck’s style isn’t quite that inimitable. That’s because, in April 1949, sounding very much like the Chuck Berry…
“He (Lonnie) certainly had a presence: the blog points are well considered. Sadly, his grace and subtlety marginalized him.” @steviegurr May 19, 2015, California. “Thank you, Paul. I enjoyed reading the writing on Lonnie Johnson you wrote. I agree he and Big Bill get overlooked.” bryanhimes @bryanhimes June 20, 2013. While I can’t agree with the blues historians…
Updated 7 June 2016 This was the first post where I was searching for the earliest rocking blues songs – songs that could be considered rock & roll as well as blues. I finally found 20 songs of this type that I have included in my book, America’s Gift. Here are my first six from…
Before Muddy (Waters), before Buddy (Guy), before even Howlin’ Wolf, there was a white kid from Chicago’s outer suburbs recording electric blues guitar in the Windy City. His name was George Barnes and he was almost certainly the second guitarist ever to record electric blues commercially. And judging from the number of instruction manuals he brought out in…
BLUESMUSE18 Johann Graupner The world’s first public performance of African-American-influenced music most probably occurred at the Federal Street Theatre, Boston, in 1799, but not quite in the manner the time-worn myth or Wikipedia portrays. According to popular legend, one of the era’s leading classical musicians, the German oboist, Johann Christian Gottlieb Graupner, is said to…
