Tommie Bradley

Guitarist Tommie Bradley and his electric guitar- and fiddle-playing colleague Adam Cole were both dynamic on the Gennett saving studios in Richmond, IN through the years 1929-1932; Cole got there initial with a program that occurred in 1928 and appears to have included Caucasian musicians. Which was an issue within the segregated saving industry from the past due ‘20s, and the problem of race provides continued to have an effect on the legacy of the BLACK artists, due to the fact their mixture of Southern rural blues, dark vaudeville, hillbilly, nation fiddling, and Tin Skillet Alley/jazz repertoire provides made them problematic for critics and historians to pigeonhole. While no verifiable data provides surfaced to pinpoint where these guys originated, informed guesswork suggests feasible linkage with central or traditional western Kentucky. The documented proof brings on a bunch of parallel contemporaries. Bradley/Cole and their numerous ensembles are similar using the Memphis Jug Music group, the Mississippi Sheiks, the Alabama Sheiks, the Beale Road Sheiks, the Mississippi Dirt Steppers, the Tennessee Chocolates Drops, the Dallas String Music group, Whistler & His Jug Music group, Ishman Bracey and Charley Taylor, Eddie Anthony and Peg Lower leg Howell, Georgia Tom Dorsey and Tampa Crimson, Al Miller, and Charlie and Joe McCoy. A straight larger comparative period would are the remaining jug bands energetic in Louisville and Memphis at that time in addition to eastern bluesmen like Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Blake, and Mississippi John Harm. A fairly comprehensive study of Bradley and Cole’s documented output was put together and released by Record in 1993.