HOME
*





Sonny Boy Williamson II
Alex or Aleck Miller (originally Ford, possibly December 5, 1912 – May 24, 1965), known later in his career as Sonny Boy Williamson, was an American blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter. He was an early and influential blues harp stylist who recorded successfully in the 1950s and 1960s. Miller used various names, including Rice Miller and Little Boy Blue, before calling himself Sonny Boy Williamson, which was also the name of a popular Chicago blues singer and harmonica player. To distinguish the two, Miller has been referred to as Sonny Boy Williamson II. He first recorded with Elmore James on "Dust My Broom". Some of his popular songs include " Don't Start Me Talkin'", " Help Me", "Checkin' Up on My Baby", and " Bring It On Home". He toured Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival and recorded with English rock musicians, including the Yardbirds, the Animals. "Help Me" became a blues standard, and many blues and rock artists have recorded his songs. Bi ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Greenwood, Mississippi
Greenwood is a city in and the county seat of Leflore County, Mississippi, United States, located at the eastern edge of the Mississippi Delta region, approximately 96 miles north of the state capital, Jackson, and 130 miles south of the riverport of Memphis, Tennessee. It was a center of cotton planter culture in the 19th century. The population was 15,205 at the 2010 census. It is the principal city of the Greenwood Micropolitan Statistical Area. Greenwood developed at the confluence of the Tallahatchie and the Yalobusha rivers, which form the Yazoo River. History Native Americans The flood plain of the Mississippi River has long been an area rich in vegetation and wildlife, fed by the Mississippi and its numerous tributaries. Long before Europeans migrated to America, the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indian nations settled in the Delta's bottomlands and throughout what is now central Mississippi. They were descended from indigenous peoples who had lived in the area for tho ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Checkin' Up On My Baby
"Checkin' Up on My Baby" (or sometimes "Checking On My Baby") is a song recorded by Sonny Boy Williamson II in 1960 that has become a classic of the blues. The song was not released as a single, but was included on Williamson's ''The Real Folk Blues'' album released after his death in 1965. The song has been recorded by numerous blues and other artists, making it one of Williamson's most recorded songs. Earlier songs Williamson's namesake Sonny Boy Williamson I, also known as John Lee Williamson, recorded an earlier song titled "Check Up on My Baby" in 1944. It is a topical song, with references to World War II political figures (its flip side is titled "Win the War Blues"). Although it has a different melody and lyrics, the refrain includes the line "I've got to check up on my baby, I've got to see how my baby been getting along", similar to "I'm checkin' up on my baby, find out what she's puttin' down", which later appears in the Sonny Boy Williamson II song. In 1958, Otis ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Big Joe Williams
Joseph Lee "Big Joe" Williams (October 16, 1903 – December 17, 1982) was an American Delta blues guitarist, singer and songwriter, notable for the distinctive sound of his nine-string guitar. Performing over five decades, he recorded the songs "Baby Please Don't Go", " Crawlin' King Snake" and "Peach Orchard Mama", among many others, for various record labels, including Bluebird, Delmark, Okeh, Prestige and Vocalion. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame on October 4, 1992. The blues historian Barry Lee Pearson (''Sounds Good to Me: The Bluesman's Story'', ''Virginia Piedmont Blues'') described Williams's performance: :When I saw him playing at Mike Bloomfield's "blues night" at the Fickle Pickle, Williams was playing an electric nine-string guitar through a small ramshackle amp with a pie plate nailed to it and a beer can dangling against that. When he played, everything rattled but Big Joe himself. The total effect of this incredible apparatus produced the most buzz ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Sharecropper
Sharecropping is a legal arrangement with regard to agricultural land in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. Sharecropping has a long history and there are a wide range of different situations and types of agreements that have used a form of the system. Some are governed by tradition, and others by law. The Italian ''mezzadria'', the French ''métayage'', the Catalan '' masoveria'', the Castilian ''mediero'', the Slavic ''połowcy'' and ''izdolshchina'', and the Islamic system of ''muzara‘a'' (المزارعة), are examples of legal systems that have supported sharecropping. Overview Sharecropping has benefits and costs for both the owners and the tenant. Under a sharecropping system, the landowner provided a share of land to be worked by the sharecropper, and usually provided other necessities such as housing, tools, seed, or working animals. Local merchants usually provided food and other supplies ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Money, Mississippi
Money is an unincorporated community near Greenwood in Leflore County, Mississippi, United States, in the Mississippi Delta. It has fewer than 100 residents, down from 400 in the early 1950s when a cotton mill operated there. Money is located on a railroad line along the Tallahatchie River, a tributary of the Yazoo River in the eastern part of the Mississippi Delta. The community has ZIP code 38945 in the Greenwood, Mississippi micropolitan area. Money is the site of events leading to the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till by white men, an event that gained nationwide attention. The suspects were acquitted by an all-white jury in 1955. They sold their story to '' Look'' magazine the next year and admitted their crime in the 1956 interview. History This rural area was developed for cotton cultivation. The Money post office was established in 1901. The community was named for Hernando Money, a United States Senator from Mississippi. Murder of Emmett Till Money became inf ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Lillian McMurry
Lillian Shedd McMurry (December 30, 1921 – March 18, 1999) was one of the earliest American female record producers and owner of Trumpet Records. She was influential in the development of blues music, particularly through her recordings of Sonny Boy Williamson II and her discovery of the guitarist Elmore James. Biography Lillian Shedd was born in Purvis, Mississippi. During the Great Depression, Lillian's family experienced extreme poverty. They were too poor to buy schoolbooks which were not provided by the school. At age 13, she worked part-time after school. In the early 1940s, she worked the counter at a pharmacy working from 7 am to 10 pm, seven days a week. She later earned a promotion to manager. She married furniture-store owner Willard McMurry in 1945. They met when Lillian found a piano in his furniture store and was interested in selling her old piano. They settled in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1949, she was helping her husband clear out a shop he had bought (a hardware ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Tutwiler, Mississippi
Tutwiler is a town in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, United States. The population at the 2010 census was 3,550. History In 1899, Tom Tutwiler, a civil engineer for a local railroad, made his headquarters seven miles northwest of Sumner. The town of Tutwiler was founded and named for him. When the railroad was built, the first depot erected was a two-story building. The railroad gave the town use of the top floor as a public school. Captain H.B. Fitch built and operated the first store in town. His wife took charge of the school, which began with five pupils. In 1900, a Black mob murdered a Black man remembered as "Dago Pete." He was suspected of attacking local women. In 1905, the town was incorporated, and W.E. Fite elected Mayor. J.O. Clay was the station depot agent. In 1900, the Illinois Central Railroad, running from Yazoo City to Lambert, crossed at Tutwiler, where the company built a railroad yard. In 1928, a high school was built at a cost of $40,000. The town grew ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

University Of Memphis
} The University of Memphis (UofM) is a public university, public research university in Memphis, Tennessee. Founded in 1912, the university has an enrollment of more than 22,000 students. The university maintains the Herff College of Engineering, the Center for Earthquake Research and Information (CERI), the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law, the former Lambuth University campus in Jackson, Tennessee (now a branch campus of the University of Memphis), the Loewenberg College of Nursing, the School of Public Health, the College of Communication and Fine Arts, the FedEx Institute of Technology, the Advanced Distributed Learning Workforce Co-Lab, and the Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology. The University of Memphis is Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High research activity". History In 1909, the Tennessee Legislature enacted the General Education Bill. This bill stated that three colleges be esta ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


David Evans (musicologist)
David Evans (born January 22, 1944) Dr. David Evans
''Allmusic''. Retrieved 24 September 2016
is an American ethnomusicology, ethnomusicologist and director of the Ethnomusicology/Regional Studies program at the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music in the University of Memphis, where he has worked since 1978.


Life and career

He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He studied at UCLA and began making trips to the Southern United States, southern states in the 1960s to research and record blues musicians. He recorded the singer Jack Owens (blues singer), Jack Owens in 1970 and later produced records for Jessie Mae Hemphill and other blues musicians. His research work in the Deep South was mentioned extensively in Robert Palmer (writer), Robert Palmer's tome, ''Deep Blues''. ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Blues Standard
Blues standards are blues songs that have attained a high level of recognition due to having been widely performed and recorded. They represent the best known and most interpreted blues songs that are seen as standing the test of time. Blues standards come from different eras and styles, such as ragtime-vaudeville, Delta and other early acoustic styles, and urban blues from Chicago and the West Coast. Many blues songs were developed in American folk music traditions and individual songwriters are sometimes unidentified. Blues historian Gerard Herzhaft noted: Compounding the problem is that, in the earlier days, many blues songs were not copyrighted. Later, the rights were claimed by those who recorded a subsequent version or were managers or record company owners. Nearly one half of the blues standards listed were first recorded in the pre-World War II acoustic blues era, before music publications tracked the sales of blues records. However, many popular renditions, as refl ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

The Animals
The Animals (also billed as Eric Burdon and the Animals) are an English rock band, formed in Newcastle upon Tyne in the early 1960s. The band moved to London upon finding fame in 1964. The Animals were known for their gritty, bluesy sound and deep-voiced frontman Eric Burdon, as exemplified by their signature song and transatlantic number-one hit single "The House of the Rising Sun" as well as by hits such as "We Gotta Get Out of This Place", " It's My Life", "Don't Bring Me Down", "I'm Crying", "See See Rider" and "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." The band balanced tough, rock-edged pop singles against rhythm-and-blues-oriented album material and were part of the British Invasion of the US. The Animals underwent numerous personnel changes in the mid-1960s, and suffered from poor business management, leading the original incarnation to split up in 1966. Burdon assembled a mostly new lineup of musicians under the name Eric Burdon and the Animals; the much-changed act moved to Ca ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

The Yardbirds
The Yardbirds are an English rock band, formed in London in 1963. The band's core lineup featured vocalist and harmonica player Keith Relf, drummer Jim McCarty, rhythm guitarist and later bassist Chris Dreja and bassist/producer Paul Samwell-Smith. The band started the careers of three of rock's most famous guitarists, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, all of whom ranked in the top five of ''Rolling Stone'' magazine's list of 100 greatest guitarists. The band had a string of hits throughout the mid-1960s, including " For Your Love", "Heart Full of Soul", "Shapes of Things" and "Over Under Sideways Down". Originally a blues-based band noted for their signature "rave-up" instrumental breaks, the Yardbirds broadened their range into pop, pioneering psychedelic rock and early hard rock; and contributed to many electric guitar innovations of the mid-1960s. Some rock critics and historians also cite their influence on the later punk rock, progressive rock and heavy m ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]