Tag Archives: West Coast Blues

Pianist and drummer Dave Alexander is both a highly effective vocalist and exceptional instrumentalist, who’s most widely known for many event and club looks, and his Arhoolie albums. Also called Omar Hakim Khayyam, Alexander’s an articulate article writer and advocate for the blues and African-American music. He’s created several content …

Popular and prolific, Bumble Bee Thin parlayed a familiar but rudimentary design into among the first flowerings from the Chicago design. A lot of what he performed he modified from your groundbreaking duo Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell — Slim constructed on Carr’s laconic, calm vocal design and Blackwell’s acoustic …

“Telling this business named Al Ruler apart is similar to buying specific dune within the desert,” a study associate griped to his manager, vintage R&B blaring on the jukebox in the backdrop. “That is clearly a great picture,” the smart musicologist snapped, “as the guy you are interested in utilized …

When he’s not really turning somersaults, doing backward flips, and sitting on his mind — all of the while playing, needless to say — Electric guitar Shorty is susceptible to reducing loose with savagely slashing licks in his instrument. Live, he’s merely amazing — and after some trim years, his …

Within the mid- to later ’40s, black popular music begun to mutate from golf swing jazz and boogie-woogie in to the type of rhythm & blues that helped place the building blocks for rock and roll & roll. Vocalist and pianist Hadda Brooks was among the many statistics who was …

Allegedly, Benjamin Jackson resembled a bull moose. A minimum of, that’s just what a few wags in Lucky Millinder’s music group thought — as well as the colourful moniker stuck. Until after that, he was Benjamin Jackson, nonetheless it was as Bull Moose that he lit in the R&B graphs …

A wonderfully prolific musician who brought a fast air of metropolitan sophistication to his frequently spectacular display, John “Peter” Chatman — better referred to as Memphis Slender — assuredly rates with the best blues pianists ever. He was sensible enough to consider Big Costs Broonzy’s early information about creating a …

Mose Allison certainly recognized the unusual brilliance of pianist Mercy Dee Walton. The youthful, jazz-based Allison faithfully protected Walton’s downtrodden “One Area Nation Shack” in 1957, four years after Walton acquired waxed the initial for Los Angeles-based Area of expertise Records (his first was an enormous R&B smash). Walton was …

Along with his barrelhouse-style piano playing, deeply expressive vocals, and well-crafted lyrics, Mercy Dee (delivered Mercy Walton) produced his presence felt within the blues joints of California’s San Joaquin Valley through the 1950s. His most widely known melody, “One Room Nation Shack,” has truly gone on to turn into a …

Known primarily for his difficult 1963 remake from the blues regular “Tin Skillet Alley” (offering the moaning lead acoustic guitar of Johnny Heartsman) for the tiny Sahara logo design, vocalist Ray Agee documented for an array of labeling both huge and small through the 1950s and ’60s without very much …