A young Big Joe Turner BluesMuse 12 If Albert Ammon’s ‘Boogie Woogie Stomp’ was the world’s first rock & roll record in 1936, what was the second? Allow me to put forward ‘Roll ‘Em Pete’, another rollicking piano-based boogie woogie, this one released in 1938. The Pete doing the rolling was 34-year old Pete Johnson,…
BluesMuse11 The young (very young) Irish old-style R&B band, The Strypes, performed in London recently. I tweeted their praises, but forgot to plug them in my blues blog. The Strypes are reminiscent in sound and energy to the great English bands of the 1960s like the Stones, Pretty Things and Yardbirds and Northern Ireland’s Them,…
BluesMuse10 Fifty eight years ago this May, Bill Hayley’s 12-bar blues, ‘Rock Around The Clock’, turned the world onto rock & roll. While many people claim Ike Turner’s ‘Rocket 88’ was the first rock & roll record in 1951, I’d like to put forward an innovative black pianist from Chicago called Albert Ammons who first…
BluesMuse9. Another misconception about the blues is that African Americans in the genre’s early days had no education. The great W. C. Handy, who virtually single-handedly standardized the blues into its modern 12-bar format between 1912 and 1920, had a teaching degree. Handy’s publishing partner, Harry Pace, who went on to found the African-American-owned Black…
He not only pioneered the first Chicago blues sound, he’s the only man I know who can link the emerging blues of Buddy Bolden and nineteenth century New Orleans with the birth of rock & roll. He was a white blues fanatic from Chicago who cut his teeth producing the ilk of Buddy Bolden disciple, Joe ‘King’ Oliver, in 1923,…
