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…

Kansas City, Missouri stands at the crossroads where blues and jazz meet. From the wild and wide-open days of the mid 1920s, when Tom Pendergast steadfastly refused to let Prohibition…

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…

From the early 1900s, musicians from the nearby state of Mississippi made their way to Memphis, Tennessee, attracted by the bright lights of Beale Street. Among the more prominent arrivals…

Whereas Mississippi Delta Blues is a well-known and recognisable form of the music, there is a lesser-known style that might well have slipped under the radar of some folks. It…