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Luther Tucker
Luther Tucker (January 20, 1936 – June 18, 1993) was an American blues guitarist. While soft-spoken and shy, Tucker made his presence known through his unique and clearly recognizable guitar style. Tucker helped to define the music known as Chicago blues, but played everything from blues to soul, rock, jazz and gospel, when given the chance. While never achieving the fame and notoriety of some of his contemporaries, he was considered a great guitarist whether playing his own lead style or playing on the recordings of B.B. King, Mel Brown, Pat Hare, or Elmore James. He is considered one of the most prominent rhythm guitarists of Chicago blues along with Eddie Taylor, Jody Williams and Freddie Robinson. He variously worked with Little Walter, Otis Rush, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, The James Cotton Blues Band and Elvin Bishop. Career Early years Tucker was born in Memphis, Tennessee. His father, a carpenter, built Tucker his first guitar, but his first real guitar was a Se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Memphis, Tennessee
Memphis is a city in the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is the seat of Shelby County in the southwest part of the state; it is situated along the Mississippi River. With a population of 633,104 at the 2020 U.S. census, Memphis is the second-most populous city in Tennessee, after Nashville. Memphis is the fifth-most populous city in the Southeast, the nation's 28th-largest overall, as well as the largest city bordering the Mississippi River. The Memphis metropolitan area includes West Tennessee and the greater Mid-South region, which includes portions of neighboring Arkansas, Mississippi and the Missouri Bootheel. One of the more historic and culturally significant cities of the Southern United States, Memphis has a wide variety of landscapes and distinct neighborhoods. The first European explorer to visit the area of present-day Memphis was Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto in 1541. The high Chickasaw Bluffs protecting the location from the waters of the Mississipp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Guitarist
A guitarist (or a guitar player) is a person who plays the guitar. Guitarists may play a variety of guitar family instruments such as classical guitars, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, and bass guitars. Some guitarists accompany themselves on the guitar by singing or playing the harmonica, or both. Techniques The guitarist may employ any of several methods for sounding the guitar, including finger picking, depending on the type of strings used (either nylon or steel), and including strumming with the fingers, or a guitar pick made of bone, horn, plastic, metal, felt, leather, or paper, and melodic flatpicking and finger-picking. The guitarist may also employ various methods for selecting notes and chords, including fingering, thumbing, the barre (a finger lying across many or all strings at a particular fret), and guitar slides, usually made of glass or metal. These left- and right-hand techniques may be intermixed in performance. Notable guitarists Rock, metal, ja ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elvin Bishop
Elvin Richard Bishop (born October 21, 1942) is an American blues and rock music singer, guitarist, bandleader, and songwriter. An original member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of that group in 2015 and the Blues Hall of Fame in his own right in 2016. Bishop feels that the limitations of his voice have helped his songwriting. Early life and education Bishop was born in Glendale, California, the son of Mylda (Kleege) and Elvin Bishop, Sr. He grew up on a farm near Elliott, Iowa. His family moved to Tulsa when he was 10. There he attended Will Rogers High School, winning a full scholarship to the University of Chicago as a National Merit Scholar. He moved to Chicago in 1960 to attend the university, where he majored in physics. Career In 1963, Bishop met harmonica player Paul Butterfield in the neighborhood of Hyde Park, joined Butterfield's blues band, and remained with them for five years. Bishop was original ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Cotton
James Henry Cotton (July 1, 1935 – March 16, 2017) was an American blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter, who performed and recorded with many fellow blues artists and with his own band. He also played drums early in his career. Cotton began his professional career playing the blues harp in Howlin' Wolf's band in the early 1950s. He made his first recordings in Memphis, Tennessee, Memphis for Sun Records, under the direction of Sam Phillips. In 1955, he was recruited by Muddy Waters to come to Chicago and join his band. Cotton became Muddy's bandleader and stayed with the group until 1965. In 1965, he formed the Jimmy Cotton Blues Quartet, with Otis Spann on piano, to record between gigs with the Muddy Waters band. He eventually left to form his own full-time touring group. His first full album, on Verve Records, was produced by the guitarist Mike Bloomfield and the singer and songwriter Nick Gravenites, who later were members of the band The Electric Flag, Electr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Lee Hooker
John Lee Hooker (August 22, 1912 or 1917 – June 21, 2001) was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. The son of a sharecropper, he rose to prominence performing an electric guitar-style adaptation of Delta blues. Hooker often incorporated other elements, including talking blues and early North Mississippi hill country blues. He developed his own driving-rhythm boogie style, distinct from the 1930s–1940s piano-derived boogie-woogie. Hooker was ranked 35 in ''Rolling Stone''s 2015 list of 100 greatest guitarists. Some of his best known songs include "Boogie Chillen'" (1948), "Crawling King Snake" (1949), "Dimples" (1956), " Boom Boom" (1962), and "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" (1966). Several of his later albums, including '' The Healer'' (1989), '' Mr. Lucky'' (1991), ''Chill Out'' (1995), and '' Don't Look Back'' (1997), were album chart successes in the U.S. and UK. ''The Healer'' (for the song "I'm In The Mood") and ''Chill Out'' (for the album) both e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Muddy Waters
McKinley Morganfield (April 4, 1913 April 30, 1983), known professionally as Muddy Waters, was an American blues singer and musician who was an important figure in the post-war blues scene, and is often cited as the "father of modern Chicago blues". His style of playing has been described as "raining down Delta beatitude". Muddy Waters grew up on Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi, and by age 17 was playing the guitar and the harmonica, emulating the local blues artists Son House and Robert Johnson."His thick heavy voice, the dark colouration of his tone, and his firm, almost solid, personality were all clearly derived from House," wrote the music historian Peter Guralnick in ''Feel Like Going Home'', "but the embellishments, which he added, the imaginative slide technique and more agile rhythms, were closer to Johnson." He was recorded in Mississippi by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1941. In 1943, he moved to Chicago to become a full-time professi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Otis Rush
Otis Rush Jr. (April 29, 1934 – September 29, 2018) was an American blues guitarist and singer-songwriter. His distinctive guitar style featured a slow-burning sound and long bent notes. With qualities similar to the styles of other 1950s artists Magic Sam and Buddy Guy, his sound became known as West Side Chicago blues and was an influence on many musicians, including Michael Bloomfield, Peter Green and Eric Clapton. Rush was left-handed and played as such; however, his guitars were strung with the low E string at the bottom, upside-down from typical guitarists. He often played with the little finger of his pick hand curled under the low E for positioning. It is widely believed that this contributed to his distinctive sound. He had a wide-ranging, powerful tenor voice. Early life The son of farmers Julia Campbell Boyd and Otis C. Rush, Rush was born near Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1934. Rush was one of seven children and worked on a farm throughout his childhood. At th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Little Walter
Marion Walter Jacobs (May 1, 1930 – February 15, 1968), known as Little Walter, was an American blues musician, singer, and songwriter, whose revolutionary approach to the harmonica had a strong impact on succeeding generations, earning him comparisons to such seminal artists as Django Reinhardt, Charlie Parker and Jimi Hendrix.Glover, Tony; Dirks, Scott; and Gaines, Ward (2002). ''Blues with a Feeling: The Little Walter Story''. Routledge Press. His virtuosity and musical innovations fundamentally altered many listeners' expectations of what was possible on blues harmonica.Dahl, BilLittle Walter: Biography Allmusic.com. He was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, the first and, to date, only artist to be inducted specifically as a harmonica player. Biography Early years Jacobs' date of birth is usually given as May 1, 1930, in Marksville, Louisiana. He was born without a birth certificate and when he applied for a Social Security card in 1940, his birthdate ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Abu Talib (musician)
Abu Talib (born Fred Leroy Robinson; February 24, 1939 – October 8, 2009) was an American blues and R&B guitarist. Career Born in Memphis, Tennessee, he was raised in the state of Arkansas and moved to Chicago, Illinois, in 1956. Inspired as a guitarist by Joe Willie Wilkins, he first recorded that year, backing harmonica player Birmingham Jones. In 1958, he began touring with Little Walter, and after seeing a jazz band perform was inspired to learn music formally at the Chicago School of Music. He also began working with Howlin' Wolf, recording with him such notable blues classics as "Spoonful", "Back Door Man" and "Wang Dang Doodle". In the mid-1960s, he played with R&B singers Jerry Butler and Syl Johnson, before joining Ray Charles' band in Los Angeles. While there, he recorded the instrumental "Black Fox", which became a minor pop hit reaching #56 on the ''Billboard'' Hot 100 and # 29 on the R&B chart. In the early 1970s, he worked with English blues bandleader John Ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jody Williams (blues Musician)
Joseph Leon "Jody" Williams (February 3, 1935 – December 1, 2018) was an American blues guitarist and singer. His singular guitar playing, marked by flamboyant string-bending, imaginative chord voicings and a distinctive tone, was influential in the Chicago blues scene of the 1950s. In the mid-1950s, Williams was one of the most sought-after session guitarists in Chicago, but he was little known outside the music industry, since his name rarely appeared on discs. His acclaimed comeback in 2000 led to a resurgence of interest in his early work and a reappraisal as one of the great blues guitarists.Dahl, Bill (2002). CD liner notes. ''Return of a Legend''. Williams was known for his imaginative chord selection, characterized by raised fives, and minor sixths and minor sevenths with flattened fives. He usually played with an unusual open E tuning, originally taught to him by Bo Diddley. In 2013, Williams was inducted to the Blues Hall of Fame. Early life Born in Mobile, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eddie Taylor
Eddie Taylor (January 29, 1923 – December 25, 1985) was an American electric blues guitarist and singer. Biography Born Edward Taylor in Benoit, Mississippi, as a boy Taylor taught himself to play the guitar. He spent his early years playing at venues around Leland, Mississippi, where he taught his friend Jimmy Reed to play the guitar. With a guitar style deeply rooted in the Mississippi Delta tradition, Taylor moved to Chicago, Illinois, in 1948. Taylor never achieved the stardom of some of his contemporaries in the Chicago blues scene, he was nevertheless an integral part of that era. He is especially noted as a main accompanist for Jimmy Reed; he also worked for John Lee Hooker, Big Walter Horton, Sam Lay, and others. Earwig Music Company recorded him with Kansas City Red and Big John Wrencher for the album ''Original Chicago Blues''. He later teamed up with Earring George Mayweather, and they jointly recorded several tracks, including "You'll Always Have a Home" and "Don't ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elmore James
Elmore James ( Brooks; January 27, 1918 – May 24, 1963) was an American blues guitarist, singer, songwriter, and bandleader. Noted for his use of loud amplification and his stirring voice, James was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. His slide guitar technique earned him the nickname "King of the Slide Guitar". Biography Elmore James was born Elmore Brooks in Richland, Holmes County, Mississippi, the son of 15-year-old Leola Brooks, a field hand. His father was probably Joe Willie "Frost" James, who moved in with Leola, and Elmore took his surname. He began making music at the age of 12, using a simple one-string instrument (diddley bow, or jitterbug) strung on a shack wall. As a teen he performed at dances under the names Cleanhead and Joe Willie James. James was influenced by Robert Johnson, Kokomo Arnold and Tampa Red. He recorded several of Tampa Red's songs. He also inherited from Tampa Red's band two musicians who joined his own backing band, the Bro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
