FESS: The Life and Music of Professor LonghairEvery Mardi Gras, New Orleans plays a song almost nobody remembers writing. "Go to the Mardi Gras" comes out of radios and brass bands and bar bands across the city like it's always existed — because for most of the people singing along, it has. The man who wrote it spent a decade of his life sweeping the floor of a record shop that still had his own unsold singles in the bins.Henry Roeland Byrd taught himself p...

Slim Harpo: King Bee of the Swamp Blues tells the remarkable story of James Isaac Moore, the Louisiana singer, harmonica player and songwriter who helped define swamp blues and left a lasting mark on rock and popular music. Drawing on his Baton Rouge roots, his rise through the local club scene, and his crucial partnership with producer Jay Miller, Simon Godfrey traces how Harpo developed a sound that was sly, relaxed and unmistakably his own. From the breakthrough of I'm a King Bee to the...

For more than thirty years, Albert Collins built a fierce reputation in clubs and juke joints long before the wider world took notice.Known as the Master of the Telecaster, Collins created one of the most distinctive sounds in blues: sharp, percussive and instantly recognisable. His unusual open tuning, bare-fingered attack, sliding capo and piercing electric tone produced music that felt both icy and incendiary.Albert Collins: Master of the Telecas...

"The man who brought Muddy Waters to the session that started it all — and then kept showing up for the next seventy years."In August 1947, a working pianist brought a young guitarist he believed in to a Chicago recording session. That guitarist was Muddy Waters. The label became Chess Records. And the man who made the introduction, Sunnyland Slim, spent the next seven decades doing the same thing for nearly every major figure in Chicago blues — playing alongside Howlin' W...

CRAZY BLUESMamie Smith and the Three Minutes That Changed American MusicOn August 10, 1920, a vaudeville singer named Mamie Smith stepped in front of a recording horn in a cramped New York studio and sang a song called "Crazy Blues." She was not the artist any label had been looking for. She was, by one account, a last-minute stand-in for a white singer who never showed. What happened next reshaped an industry: the record sold tens of thousands of c...

MAGIC SAM: The West Side Sound and the Blues That Got AwayOn the morning of December 1, 1969, Sam Maghett collapsed in his own home, three weeks after his thirty-second birthday — at the exact moment his career was finally catching up to his talent. A Stax contract was being negotiated. A European tour was on the calendar. Weeks earlier, he'd torn apart the Ann Arbor Blues Festival alongside Charlie Musselwhite. By afternoon, all of it was gone.This book te...

Freddie King: The Texas CannonballHe was the guitarist other guitarists studied in secret. Eric Clapton learned "Hide Away" note by note from a hard-to-find record. Stevie Ray Vaughan absorbed his phrasing until it became the bedrock of Texas blues. Peter Green, Mick Taylor, Jeff Beck, and a generation of British players built their sound on his licks. Yet for most of his career, Freddie King remained a musician's musician—more influential than famous, more imitate...

Before Robert Johnson's devil haunted the crossroads, Peetie Wheatstraw was already laughing with the Devil's daughter.Born William Bunch, the son of Arkansas sharecroppers, Wheatstraw arrived in East St. Louis in 1929 with little more than a self-taught knowledge of piano and guitar—and a shrewd understanding of how to make himself heard. Within a year, he had transformed himself into "Peetie Wheatstraw, the Devil's Son-in-Law, the High Sheriff from Hell," one of the most distinct...

He never sang louder than a man leaning against a doorway, and never played a riff he couldn't repeat in his sleep. Yet Jimmy Reed—Mississippi sharecropper's son, Chicago steelworker, self-taught bluesman—wrote more songs other people wanted to sing than almost anyone of his generation. "Baby What You Want Me to Do." "Big Boss Man." "Bright Lights, Big City." The Rolling Stones learned from him. Elvis covered him.Behind the laid-back sound was a man wrestling with epilepsy, alcohol...

He built his first guitar with one string and whatever the swamp offered. He never really stopped.Born in 1903 on the edge of Mississippi's Noxubee Swamp, Joseph Lee Williams left home as a teenager and spent the next six decades proving that a blues musician's real instrument was motion itself — riding rails, working levee camps, touring with travelling minstrel shows, and turning up wherever a crowd needed convincing. Along the way he modified an ordinary guitar into something no...

The Forgotten Story of the Blues Boom in BritainIn October 1958 a Chicago guitarist walked onto a Leeds stage with a Fender Telecaster turned up louder than anything the room had ever heard. Some walked out. The papers called it "screaming guitar and howling piano." A handful of young Britons stayed, listened, and began a quiet, stubborn search that would reshape popular music.This is not the familiar tale of a few gifted teenagers inventing the blues overnight. It...

Play "Double Trouble" for someone who's never heard the name Otis Rush, and watch their face change. That minor-key ache. That guitar answering the voice like a second singer picking a fight. Somewhere around the second chorus, they'll ask who this is — and you'll have to explain that you're probably the first person who ever told them.Eric Clapton names him as one of his three foundational influences. Peter Green built early Fleetwood Mac on top of his riffs. Led Zeppelin's first ...