The YZ of blues and a few numbers. Final part of AMERICA’S Gift Index

The YZ of blues and a few numbers. Final part of AMERICA’S Gift Index

The minuscule YZ of blues. The final two letters of the AMERICA’S Gift index, plus some numbers.    A Ziegfeld girl   Why is AMERICA’S Gift’s YZ index so brief?  It goes to show just how few people, places and songs, in the blues lexicon, begin with Y or Z. Virginia Liston’s raunchy old blues song ‘You’ve Got The…

The VW of blues … VW figures that DON’T lie

The VW of blues … VW figures that DON’T lie

  America’s Gift’s VW Index. Where the figures aren’t fudged.  As you might expect, the entertainment genre, ‘vaudeville’, features on many pages in the book because that’s where most entertainers playing prototype blues in the early twentieth century were performing. You’ll see Muddy Waters gets quite a few mentions, too, even though AMERICA’S Gift doesn’t reinvent the…

The STU of blues – dedicated to the unknown Stone

The STU of blues – dedicated to the unknown Stone

The STU INDEX of America’s Gift: dedicated to Stu Stewart, the sixth Rolling Stone The young Stones with Ian Stewart, left. Ian Stewart was thought too ugly to be a Rolling Stone, even though he was founder Brian Jones’ first recruit. With Mick Jagger on vocals, Keith Richards on guitar, Mick Avory (later of the Kinks) on drums, Dick…