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,…

“It’s like you read my mind! You seem to know a lot about this, like you wrote the book on it or something. I think that you could do with a few pics to drive the message hoome a little bit, but other than that, this is great blog. A great read. I will certainly…

Admittedly, it wasn’t a good review, but one of the earliest descriptions of the wild pre-blues African-American-style music heard in London during 1890 came from no less a source than the celebrated Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw. The photograph below was taken around the time Shaw wrote his damning account of being forced to listen…