Musicians and music scholars rightly focus on the sounds of the blues and the colorful life stories of blues performers. Equally important and, until now, inadequately studied are the lyrics. The international ...

Sam Myers: The Blues Is My Story recounts the life of bluesman Sam Myers (1936-2006), as told in his own words to author Jeff Horton. Myers grew up visually handicapped in the Jim Crow South and left home ...

Rhythm & blues emerged from the African American community in the late 1940s to become the driving force in American popular music over the next half-century. Although sometimes called “doo-wop,” ...

Elmore James, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Milton, and James Waller-all of these musical powerhouses furthered their recording careers at a little label on once-thriving Farish Street, the historic black ...

Yank Rachell and his mandolin playing style moved every musician lucky enough to hear him perform in the early sixties. When he died in April 1997, he left behind a stack of unanswered requests to tour ...

2020 Blues Hall of Fame Classic of Blues Literature

Jimi Hendrix called Earl Hooker “the master of the wah-wah pedal. ” Buddy Guy slept with one of Hooker's slides beneath his pillow hoping to tap ...

In 1969 Gerhard Kubik chanced to encounter a Mozambican labor migrant, a miner in Transvaal, South Africa, tapping a cipendani, a mouth-resonated musical bow. A comparable instrument was seen in the hands ...

Association of Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence
Recorded Gospel Music (1998)

In Roosevelt's Blues, Guido van Rijn documents more than a hundred blues and gospel lyrics that contain direct ...