Most everyone knows of Charles Brown, the man responsible for the best of all Christmas Songs, “Merry Christmas Baby”, Texas blues giant Clarence Gatemouth Brown and Dallas-born Walter Brown who…

Digging back into the Big Bear archives is always a fascinating and often surprising business. For instance, I just came across the programme for the 5th year of our Birmingham…

2021 seems to be shaping up to be a good year for those of us who are interested in those earliest recorded blues, with the release of seven CD sets, each…

It is surprising how many bluesmen have some sort of association with Dockery Plantation, a familiar name to many blues fans. But what exactly was Dockery, did it originate as…

Considering the importance of the one man band in the Blues lexicon, it is remarkable how few of them ever achieved significant prominence. The first of this rare and precious…

Since the early 1920s Paris had become a bolt-hole for black American musicians. During the First World War black U.S. troops had discovered a racial freedom that was denied them…

Listening to those self-assured early female blues singers, I’m always impressed by the strength of character, confidence and self-assuredness at a time and place when society seemed determined to crush…

The origins of Texas Blues go back to the early 1900s when a veritable army of the unemployed came to the state to work in the oilfields, ranches and lumber…

I was seventeen years old, as fed up with school as it was with me, impatiently awaiting my call-up to National Service in the RAF and increasingly curious about what…

One afternoon back in 1973, I took an unexpected telephone call. It was Victoria Spivey.  Considering that we had only previously been in contact by letter, and that had mostly…