Oh, the irony! White evangelists peddled drugs and booze, as black families feared the blues. When it comes to blues, booze, drugs and religion, this is a world laced with irony. In the early days of blues, black families, steeped in a century of Christianity, worried sick about sons, daughters and grandchildren playing what they…

American music’s history’s big black hole. When researching my blues and American music history book, America’s Gift, I became slowly aware of how a huge slice of America’s musical past had virtually disappeared into what South Carolina’s Cradle of Jazz Project has described as a black hole. Come to think of it, it was the very…

If I told you W.C. Handy’s classic “St. Louis Blues” was the most influential blues song ever recorded, would you believe me? Possibly not. You may well be thinking of an important blues by Big Bill Broonzy, Willie Dixon, or even Cream, a song that brought blues to the masses. However, my case is pretty…

I was recently told, by an American who’d read America’s Gift, how astounded he was at how little he knew about the history of his country’s music. And he was a big blues fan. “America’s Gift should be taught in schools,” he said. “But it won’t be, because there’s too much in it (America’s Gift)…

  It’s astounding just how many assumptions there are about the evolution of the blues. I remember Van Morrison saying recently that “some people think the blues started with Jimi Hendrix”. Others think blues started in the 1950s with the emergence of Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and company. Talking of John Lee Hooker, I…