Considering the importance of the one man band in the Blues lexicon, it is remarkable how few of them ever…

American Blues Legends ’74 took the likes of Doctor Ross, Cousin Joe, Big John Wrencher and Eddie Playboy Taylor on…

Chuck Berry, photographed by Jim Simpson at Birmingham Hippodrome in 1964 Chuck Berry was a difficult man. Moody, erratic, arrogant,…

Following on from last week’s Part 1 of Paris Blues featuring Memphis Slim and Willie Mabon, we feature the third of those great…

Since the early 1920s Paris had become a bolt-hole for black American musicians. During the First World War black U.S.…

Willie Dixon, maybe the single most influential of bluesmen, was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on the first day of July…

I will never understand why Hurricane Bobby Charles is not a household name in Blues and Rock & Roll. Admittedly,…

Photograph: Howlin Wolf at Birmingham Town Hall, 1964. Copyright Jim Simpson. June the 10th marks the 111th anniversary of an…

Producer of the American Blues Legends ’75 album Jim Simpson talks us through the backstories behind the bluesmen on the…

A remarkable number of important Black American bluesmen, as well as jazz musicians, singers and dancers, left the U.S. and…