Big Road Blues

Below is a guest article sent to me by a listener and owner of Joe’s Vintage Guitars. By Joe Dampt | Joe’s Vintage Guitars A guitar in an old blues photograph invites a closer look. The outline of the body, a pale fingerboard or a flash of metal can become almost as familiar as the […]

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Show Notes: Today’s show is part of a semi-regular, long-running feature I call Forgotten Blues Heroes that spotlights great, but little remembered and little recorded blues artists that don’t really fit into my weekly themed shows. This show is something of a mopping up operation, playing the rest of the sides of several blues ladies […]

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Show Notes: Today’s show explores the intersection of jazz and blues, spotlighting giants Louis Armstrong and King Oliver. In the summer of 1924 Louis Armstrong quit King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band; when word reached New York City, Fletcher Henderson, who fronted the most prestigious Black band in America, cabled the 23-year-old trumpeter to offer him […]

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  Show Notes:  A wide-ranging mix show as we open with two by singer Irene Wiley, sets revolving around covers of the songs “Bricks In My Pillow” and “Somebody Got To Go”, a fine set of slide blues, several fine early blues ladies. We also play two sets of field by my friend recordings by […]

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Show Notes:  Today’s show is devoted to the early recordings of Josh White, who in some ways, was plagued with the same criticisms as Big Broonzy’s and Sonny Terry & Brownie’s McGee’s folk period. As Chris Smith notes: “The phases of Josh White’s career have long aroused controversy; …many white blues fans dismissed White’s ‘folk […]

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