News & Updates — blues

I want to give some birthday love to one of my favorite figures from the '60s soul scene, the underrated Fontella Bass! Fontella is most remembered for a song that everyone knows but many people think is by Aretha Franklin! "Rescue Me" was a #1 hit in 1965 for Chess Records, their biggest seller since Chuck Berry's mid-'50s reign. Bass was denied songwriting credit, despite her contribution as a co-author. The tune has lasted forever and has been covered many, many times, as well as used in movies, ads, etc. The song was banned from radio by Clear Channel after...

One of the most influential of blues musicians, Willie Dixon was a composer, singer, bassist, guitarist and record producer who was responsible for writing (or modernizing) long-standing jams like "Spoonful", "I Just Wanna Make Love To You", "Evil", "I Ain't Superstitious", "Wang Dang Doodle", "Hoochie-Coochie Man", "My Babe" and many more. Born in Mississippi, he heard the blues on a prison farm in the late '20s and a few years later was singing the bass part in a gospel group and selling songs to local singers. In 1936 he moved to Chicago and was a successful professional boxer before dropping...

David "Honeyboy" Edwards lived to be nearly a hundred years old! The Delta bluesman was playing concerts right up until the day he died and I was fortunate enough to catch him with Corey Harris in Massachusetts many moons ago. Not only had he been a living, breathing representative of live old school Delta blues well into the new millennium, but he was doubly important to blues scholars as a man who could fill in some details on long-gone figures, such as his close friend Robert Johnson, whom he toured with and was present the night Johnson was poisoned. He...

Bill Broonzy had a long and distinguished career, from spirituals to jazz to country blues to urban and back to folksy. One of 17 children born to a Southern family (precise date and location, unsure), he grew up in Arkansas. His first instrument was a cigar-box fiddle and he sang spirituals. He was a preacher, farmer, soldier and husband for awhile before he went north to Chicago around 1920. In Chicago he started playing guitar and gigging, signed to Paramount and released his first sides in 1927. He did some recording in NYC and toured with Memphis Minnie as her...

Happy birthday to the King of Zydeco, Clifton Chenier, born on this day in 1925. A multi-instrumentalist from a musically-accomplished family, his music combined blues, cajun, jazz, rock & roll, waltzes and R&B to modernize and popularize the zydeco style. He recorded for Chess, Arhoolie, Specialty, Crazy Cajun and other labels, in a recording career that started in 1954 (he had been performing since the mid '40s) and continued until his death in '87 from diabetes. He sang, played accordion, harmonica and guitar. He came from a musical family and he dug early on into the burgeoning rock & roll scene,...