How ironic is it that white kids living in England in the mid-1960s were more exposed to black American blues than your average white teenager in the United States? Without knowing it, in 1950s England, I’d heard the blues of Lead Belly, Leroy Carr and Little Son Joe, on national TV and radio, through the…
Black guitar owners – rare as gelding balls before 1890s. If you read my last post, you’ll know I featured Henry Sloan, the African-American farmer in Mississippi who taught Charlie Patton how to play early Delta Blues guitar around the turn of the 20th century. But where did Henry Sloan Henry – born in 1870, just…
“Always fun reading, Paul. Thanks.” Jason Vivone (@JVivone), leader of the Billy Bats, Kansas City. In this short series, I’m going to highlight four extremely influential, but mainly unknown nineteenth-century blues guitar pioneers, each of whom features in my blues history book, America’s Gift, at http://goo.gl/At5AZe These were the guys who did the spade-work for…
North East Texas. 1899. A tender-aged ‘songster’, as roaming black minstrels were known back then, had travelled from his home in Louisiana around 1899 to busk in neighbouring Texas. Whether the boy was 10, 11 or 14 depends on which birth date you believe – 1885, 1888 or 1889. All are given in his various biographies,…
George W. Thomas Jnr, Hersal and Hociel Thomas, Sippie Wallace (nee Thomas) and Bernice Edwards. Last time, we talked about the family of Henderson Chatmon, the ‘musicianer’, as musicians called themselves in the nineteenth century, from Bolton, Mississippi. Henderson, a former slave, and his wife Eliza, ran a family string band around the turn of the…
