Results for "Son House"

Son House

Son House, the legendary Delta blues singer and guitarist, was an original voice coming out of Depression era Mississippi. He embodied the isolation, poverty and alienation of the Delta, which translated into his visceral and gripping expressions, forming the bedrock of the blues idiom. His influence looms large in the annals of American popular music. House was born on the Mississippi River Delta, on a plantation between the towns of Lyon and Clarksdale. The Delta, formed by the Big Muddy's deposits of silt, is a flat belt of fertile land that has been used for farming since the eighteenth century

Roy McCurdy: From Cannonball to the Rochester Music Hall of Fame

By SCOTT GUDELL

When we placed a call from New York to Los Angeles in the early part of 2021, the articulate and vibrant drummer Roy McCurdy answered and quickly connected us back to the 1950s. He told us about his hometown of jny: Rochester, New York, his early days performing with Chuck Mangione and Gap Mangione and how ...

Fall 2020

By DOUG COLLETTE

Blues Deluxe is a regular column comprised of pithy takes on recent blues and roots-music releases of note. It spotlights titles in those genres that might otherwise go unnoticed under the cultural radar. Heathcote Hill “the stories we are told" 311 Music 2020 Roots-music artists too often sacrifice ...

Nancy Kelly: A Dynamic And Determined Voice

By SCOTT GUDELL

Nancy Kelly has been singin,' swingin' and scattin' for a long time. Her first musical path took her into the world of classical music when she started playing by ear at age three and her mother guided her to piano lessons by age four. The Beatles arrived a decade later and she abruptly shifted her allegiance ...

Cotton Pickin' Blues

By MARTIN MCFIE

Blues began with enslaved African peoples' work songs in the cotton fields of the Deep South of America. The Slave Narrative of Mr. Sam Polite, given at 93 years of age, chronicles that life. It was written on St. Helena, a cotton producing Sea Island in the Carolinas, where Mr. Polite was born into slavery. The ...

Dexter Payne: All Things, All Beings

By CHRIS M. SLAWECKI

Clarinet, harmonica and saxophonist, composer and bandleader and musical globetrotter Dexter Payne is the type of musician who is most often categorized as “difficult to categorize." Profoundly influenced by physical and spiritual journeys through the cultures of America, the Middle East, Africa and Brazil, Payne's recorded output checks off every box from Mississippi delta blues to ...

Lance Canales & The Flood At Biscuits & Blues

By WALTER ATKINS

Lance Canales & The Flood Biscuits & Blues San Francisco CA May 28, 2017 Lance Canales & The Flood rolled into Biscuits & Blues on a Sunday evening with their authentic foot stompin' blues and intimate life stories. Canales, a proud son of the Central California farm region, called Fresno home. ...

Ethan Margolis: Perfect Mission of Feeling

By CHRIS M. SLAWECKI

Describing guitarist, composer, bandleader, producer and conceptualist Ethan Margolis as a citizen of the world barely does him or his music justice. Born and raised in jny: Cleveland (OH), Margolis left the US when he was 21 to study the art of Gypsy flamenco guitar in Spain. He stayed there for more than a decade, living ...

Mississippi Heat: Warning Shot

By C. MICHAEL BAILEY

My father, born in 1915 and having seen and heard such, would call Warning Shot “Roadhouse Music." More technically, this is “jump blues" employing a larger-than-average band with an unidentified horn section on a majority of the 16 selections, the longest clocking in at 5:36 and the shortest at 3:00. This is an old-fashioned recording of ...

Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers Vol I & II

By NENAD GEORGIEVSKI

Without a doubt, when it comes to blues music and its legacy,guitarist Robert Johnson is its preeminent performer and a key figure. For many, he is the greatest blues man of all time, certainly the most well regarded by modern popular culture. As such, his place in the vanguard of that pantheon has been secured. But ...