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Bentonia School (blues)
The Bentonia school, a style of guitar-playing sometimes attributed to blues players from Bentonia, Mississippi, features a shared repertoire of songs, guitar tunings and chord-voicings with a distinctively minor tonality not found in other styles of blues music. While not all blues musicians from Bentonia played in this style, one particular blues player, Skip James (1902–1969), had a distinct, complicated, and highly sophisticated style that veered from typical blues guitar playing. His style became known as Bentonia School. James became the most well-known of the small pool of musicians associated with the Bentonia School. Others include Jack Owens, Jimmy "Duck" Holmes, and the un-recorded Henry Stuckey.The Blues Encyclopedia, eds Edward Komara, Peter Lee, Taylor and Francis Group (2006), p.696 Both James' and Owens' styles featured haunting minor chords and droning strings which, in comparison to the music of many other blues musicians, ring with an ominous and eerie fee ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Guitar
The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that typically has six strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing selected strings against frets with the fingers of the opposite hand. A plectrum or individual finger picks may also be used to strike the strings. The sound of the guitar is projected either acoustically, by means of a resonant chamber on the instrument, or amplified by an electronic pickup and an amplifier. The guitar is classified as a chordophone – meaning the sound is produced by a vibrating string stretched between two fixed points. Historically, a guitar was constructed from wood with its strings made of catgut. Steel guitar strings were introduced near the end of the nineteenth century in the United States; nylon strings came in the 1940s. The guitar's ancestors include the gittern, the vihuela, the four- course Renaissance guitar, and the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jack Owens (blues Singer)
Jack Owens (November 17, 1904 – February 9, 1997) was an American blues singing, singer and guitarist, from Bentonia, Mississippi. Biography Owens was born L. F. Nelson. His mother was Celia Owens; his father was George Nelson, who abandoned his family when Jack was 5 or 6 years old. After that time, he was raised by the Owens family with his maternal grandfather, the father of eight children, according to the 1910 census, two of whom shared the Nelson name. (This does not account for two more children born after that census.) While very young, Owens learned some chords on the guitar from his father and an uncle. He also learned to play the Fife (musical instrument), fife, fiddle, and piano while still a child, but his chosen instrument was the guitar. Owens did not seek to become a professional recording artist. He farmed, sold rum-running, bootleg liquor, and ran a weekend juke joint in Bentonia for most of his life. His peer, Skip James, had left home and traveled until he ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Mugge
Robert Mugge (born May 8, 1950) is an American documentary film maker. He has focused primarily on films about music and musicians, but some of his earliest films were not music focused and he is now continuing to branch out as his interests and work evolve. Biography Robert Mugge was born in Chicago, Illinois where his father, Robert H. Mugge, was earning his doctorate in Sociology from the University of Chicago. Over the next two years, the family moved to Atlanta, Washington, DC, and then Raleigh, North Carolina, as Mugge's father finished his dissertation on Black Migration in the South and began a career in state and federal government. In 1959, Mugge moved with his father, his mother Elizabeth Mugge (née Messersmith), and three younger siblings to the Washington, D.C. suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland, which the family made its permanent home. Mugge attended John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring during its progressive period of the mid-1960s where he was encouraged ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Townsend (musician)
Henry "Mule" Townsend (born Henry Jesse James Townsend; October 27, 1909 – September 24, 2006) was an American blues singer, guitarist and pianist. Career Townsend was born Henry Jesse James Townsend in Shelby, Mississippi to Allen and Omelia Townsend. His father was a blues musician who played guitar and accordion. When Henry was young, his family moved near Cairo, Illinois. Henry left home at the age of nine because of his abusive father and hoboed his way to St. Louis, Missouri. He learned guitar while in his early teens from a locally renowned blues guitarist known as Dudlow Joe. With aspirations to earn a living with his guitar, Townsend also worked as an auto mechanic, a shoe shiner, a hotel manager, and a salesman. By the late 1920s he had begun touring and recording with the pianist Walter Davis and had acquired the nickname Mule, because he was sturdy in both physique and character. In St. Louis, he worked with some of the early blues pioneers, including J. D. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Crudup
Arthur William "Big Boy" Crudup (August 24, 1905 – March 28, 1974) was an American Delta blues singer, songwriter and guitarist. He is best known, outside blues circles, for his songs "That's All Right" (1946), "My Baby Left Me" and "So Glad You're Mine", later recorded by Elvis Presley and other artists. Early life Crudup was born on August 24, 1905, in Union Grove, Forest, Mississippi, to a family of migrant workers traveling through the South and Midwest. The family returned to Mississippi in 1926, where he sang gospel music. He had lessons with a local bluesman, whose name was Papa Harvey, and later he was able to play in dance halls and cafes around Forest. Around 1940 he went to Chicago.Arthur Crudup , ''Biography.com''. Retrieved 29 January 2018 Musical career He began his career as a blues sin ...[...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Albert Collins
Albert Gene Drewery, known as Albert Collins and the Ice Man (October 1, 1932 – November 24, 1993),Skeely, Richard. "Albert Collins: Biography" Allmusic.com. was an American electric blues guitarist and singer with a distinctive guitar style. He was noted for his powerful playing and his use of altered tunings and a capo. His long association with the Fender Telecaster led to the title "The Master of the Telecaster". Early life Collins was born in Leona, Texas, on October 1, 1932. He was introduced to the guitar at an early age by his cousin Lightnin' Hopkins, also a Leona resident, who played at family gatherings. The Collins family relocated to Marquez, Texas, in 1938 and to Houston in 1941,Obrecht, Jas, ed. (1993). ''Blues Guitar: The Men Who Made the Music''. 2nd ed. Miller Freeman Books. pp. 246–259. . where he attended Jack Yates High School.''Albert Collins''. Vital Blues Guitar Series. Transcriptions by Richard DeVinck. Creative Concepts Publishing (California), 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bukka White
Booker T. Washington "Bukka" White (November 12, 1906 February 26, 1977) was an American Delta blues guitarist and singer. Biography White was born south of Houston, Mississippi. He was a first cousin of B.B. King's mother (White's mother and King's grandmother were sisters). ''Bukka'' is a phonetic spelling of White's first name; he was named after the African-American educator and civil rights activist Booker T. Washington. He played National resonator guitars, typically with a slide, in an open tuning. He was one of the few, along with Skip James, to use a crossnote tuning in E minor, which he may have learned, as James did, from Henry Stuckey. He also played piano, but less adeptly. White started his career playing the fiddle at square dances. He claimed to have met Charley Patton soon after, but some have doubted this recollection. Nonetheless, Patton was a strong influence on White. "I wants to come to be a great man like Charlie Patton", White told his friends. H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jimmy "Duck" Holmes
Jimmy "Duck" Holmes (born July 28, 1947) is an American blues musician and proprietor of the Blue Front Cafe on the Mississippi Blues Trail, the oldest surviving juke joint in Mississippi. Holmes is known as the last of the Bentonia bluesmen, as he is the last blues musician to play the Bentonia School. Like Skip James and Jack Owens and other blues musicians from Bentonia, Mississippi, Holmes learned to play the blues from Henry Stuckey, the originator of the Bentonia blues. Holmes' music is based in the Bentonia tuning utilizing open E-minor, open D-minor and a down tuned variant, and is noted for its haunting, ethereal, rhythmic and hypnotic qualities. His eighth album, ''It Is What It Is'', on Blue Front Records has been praised by fans and music critics who have called it: "addictive" and "obsession worthy," and "as gritty, stark and raw as one could imagine" and "absolutely hypnotic," and "an essential modern recording." Early life Jimmy Charles Holmes was born in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Skip James
Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James (June 9, 1902October 3, 1969) was an American Delta blues singer, guitarist, pianist and songwriter. AllMusic stated: "This emotional, lyrical performer was a talented blues guitarist and arranger with an impressive body of work." His guitar playing is noted for its dark, minor-key sound, played in an open D-minor tuning with an intricate fingerpicking technique. James first recorded for Paramount Records in 1931, but these recordings sold poorly, having been released during the Great Depression, and he drifted into obscurity. After a long absence from the public eye, James was rediscovered in 1964 by blues enthusiasts including John Fahey, helping further the blues and folk music revival of the 1950s and early 1960s. During this period, James appeared at folk and blues festivals, gave concerts around the country, and recorded several albums for various record labels. His songs have influenced generations of musicians and have been adapted by num ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture. The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and is characterized by the call-and-response pattern (the blues scale and specific chord progressions) of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes (or "worried notes"), usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch, are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove. Blues as a genre is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current str ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tonality
Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and/or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions and directionality. In this hierarchy, the single pitch or triadic chord with the greatest stability is called the tonic. The root of the tonic chord forms the name given to the key, so in the key of C major, the note C is both the tonic of the scale and the root of the tonic chord (which is C–E–G). Simple folk music songs often start and end with the tonic note. The most common use of the term "is to designate the arrangement of musical phenomena around a referential tonic in European music from about 1600 to about 1910". Contemporary classical music from 1910 to the 2000s may practice or avoid any sort of tonality—but harmony in almost all Western popular music remains tonal. Harmony in jazz includes many but not all tonal characteristics of the European common practice period, usually known as "classical music". "All harmonic idioms in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Minor Scale
In music theory, the minor scale is three scale patterns – the natural minor scale (or Aeolian mode), the harmonic minor scale, and the melodic minor scale (ascending or descending) – rather than just two as with the major scale, which also has a harmonic form but lacks a melodic form. In each of these scales, the first, third, and fifth scale degrees form a minor triad (rather than a major triad, as in a major scale). In some contexts, ''minor scale'' is used to refer to any heptatonic scale with this property (see Related modes below). Natural minor scale Relationship to relative major A natural minor scale (or Aeolian mode) is a diatonic scale that is built by starting on the sixth degree of its relative major scale. For instance, the A natural minor scale can be built by starting on the 6th degree of the C major scale: : Because of this, the key of A minor is called the ''relative minor'' of C major. Every major key has a relative minor, which starts ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
