Updated 1 June 2016 A few posts ago, I promised to shed light upon one of the earliest influences on the origin of the blues that remains untold. The time has come to reveal all. (These clues, of course, were also later revealed in my book, America’s Gift.) My clue was found buried away in an 1882 edition of…
Updated 30 August 2017 EXCLUSIVE. How blue American sea shanties led to filthy rugby songs and, unbelievably, blues. Two Rugby players say ‘hello’ before an evening of beer and communal sing song. For some reason, the most read item since my blog started on blogspot four years ago – by tens of thousands of hits –…
UPDATED: 4 March 2019. Did 1930s bluesman Sleepy John Estes influence Tyrannosaurus Rex? Before the electric guitar-boogie pop of Marc Bolan’s T-Rex – the group who started Britain’s early 1970s glam-rock era – some might remember we had the hip underground folk-rock of Bolan’s T-Rex’s forerunner: Tyrannosaurus Rex. Tyrannosaurus Rex was an early hippy-style band whose most interesting…
UPDATED JULY 18th, 2021. Little Willie Littlefield There must be something intrinsically cool about Kansas City, Missouri, in the way it gets so many references in the world of blues and rock & roll destinations, lyrics and stage names, comparative to its size. Only last month I put up a post featuring Memphis Minnie’s first…
UPDATED: JULY 11th 2018 Is this a world exclusive? Well, I’d never seen it mentioned when I first wrote this five years ago. And I haven’t seen it mentioned since. BluesMuse46. Nearly 103 years ago, a song was recorded that many blues and jazz traditionalists rate as their genres’ greatest of all time. It was Christmas…
