One of the very few good things to come about during this Covid nightmare is the opportunity it affords to dig into the archives. With our usual work of booking…

Here’s a funiosity.   On the surface this Press Release from some 46 years ago appears to be about a routine like-for-like replacement for a musician suddenly taken sick mid-tour.…

Black Bottom was a predominantly black neighbourhood in Detroit, Michigan. A lot of folk wrongly believe that it got its name from the African-American community that developed there in the…

One Sunday morning, probably in 1984, there was a knock on my front door. I was surprised to find Chicago Blues hooligan Eddie C. Campbell, grinning as he always did,…

Count Basie in Birmingham (photo by Jim Simpson) A lot of stone blues fans out there are probably unaware of just how blues-rooted the great Count Basie Orchestra was. That…

For a man known for taking every opportunity to cuss out his fellow musicians and anyone else who would pay heed – for the merest hint of profanity, an off-colour…

Bob ‘The Bear’ Hite was the leader and the singer with the massively successful Canned Heat. Formed in Los Angeles in 1965, they always worked at promoting The Blues and,…

It’s hard to think of a more appropriate place for a blues musician to be born than on a steamboat in Shreveport, Louisiana. That’s where Napoleon Chism, known to the…

Photo: Muddy Waters at Birmingham Town Hall, 1964. Copyright Jim Simpson. In honour of Muddy Waters’ birthday on 4th April, Jim Simpson pays tribute to the great man and many…

In the early 1960s I was working days as a photographer at Birmingham College of Advanced Technology, now known as Aston University. I somehow found myself running the students’ weekly…