Top blues-inspired artwork, from a top blues-inspired artist. Since discovering a link between crude early blues lyrics and rude rugby songs, I’ve long championed the connection between old blues music and the rough-and-rumble game of rugby union. My book, America’s Gift, features a chapter on this connection. I also have two posts on dirty blues…
Dave “I invented the big beat” Bartholomew 1918-2019. Born Davis Bartholomew in Louisiana in 1918, Dave helped write and record some of early rock ’n’ roll’s most enduring hits, including ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’ for Lloyd Price in 1952, ‘Ain’t That a Shame’ in 1955 and ‘Blueberry Hill’ in 1956 for Fats Domino, and ‘I Hear…
I’ve just come across an amazing discovery. Researching my new book, ‘150 Years of Rock ‘n’ Roll’, I’ve found what I think just might be the very first prototype rock ‘n’ roll record. If you ignore the first nine seconds, that is. Composed by Charles ‘Cow Cow’ Davenport, it’s called “Cow Cow Blues” and sung…
‘Boogie Woogie Stomp’ bumped as America’s Gift’s earliest rock ‘n’ roll record. Below is a page from my blues history book, America’s Gift, showing the rocking blues I consider the six earliest prototype rock ‘n’ roll records. (The book features 20 in all.) I’d decided against putting Clarence ‘Pinetop’ Smith’s 1929 hit, ‘Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie’…
