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David Maxwell (musician)
David Maxwell (March 10, 1943 – February 13, 2015) was an American blues pianist, songwriter, and singer. Over his lengthy career, Maxwell variously worked with Louisiana Red, Muddy Waters, Skip James, Bonnie Raitt, John Lee Hooker, James Cotton, Levon Helm, Buddy Guy, Jimmy Rogers, Charlie Musselwhite, Johnny Adams, Ronnie Earl, Freddie King and Hubert Sumlin. He also released a number of albums under his own name. Maxwell was nominated for a Blues Music Award in 2015 in the category Pinetop Perkins Piano Player, which was ultimately won by Marcia Ball. Biography Maxwell was born in Waltham, Massachusetts. He was educated at the University of Rochester and Eastman School of Music. he became friends with Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson in high school, and they played together at several local engagements. Maxwell became part of the local blues scene in Boston in the late 1960s, having been initially inspired by the piano stylings of Otis Spann, Sunnyland Slim, Pinetop Perkins, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Waltham, Massachusetts
Waltham ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, and was an early center for the labor movement as well as a major contributor to the American Industrial Revolution. The original home of the Boston Manufacturing Company, the city was a prototype for 19th century industrial city planning, spawning what became known as the Waltham-Lowell system of labor and production. The city is now a center for research and higher education, home to Brandeis University and Bentley University as well as industrial powerhouse Raytheon Technologies. The population was 65,218 at the census in 2020. Waltham has been called "watch city" because of its association with the watch industry. Waltham Watch Company opened its factory in Waltham in 1854 and was the first company to make watches on an assembly line. It won the gold medal in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. The company produced over 35 million watches, clocks and instruments before it closed in 1957. Histo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hubert Sumlin
Hubert Charles Sumlin (November 16, 1931 – December 4, 2011) was a Chicago blues guitarist and singer, best known for his "wrenched, shattering bursts of notes, sudden cliff-hanger silences and daring rhythmic suspensions" as a member of Howlin' Wolf's band. He was ranked number 43 in ''Rolling Stone''s "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". Biography Sumlin was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and raised in Hughes, Arkansas. He got his first guitar when he was eight years old. As a boy, he met Howlin' Wolf by sneaking into a performance. Wolf relocated from Memphis to Chicago in 1953, but his longtime guitarist Willie Johnson chose not to join him. In Chicago, Wolf hired the guitarist Jody Williams, but in 1954 he invited Sumlin to move to Chicago to play second guitar in his band. Williams left the band in 1955, leaving Sumlin as the primary guitarist, a position he held almost continuously (except for a brief spell playing with Muddy Waters around 1956) for the remainder of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Oscher
Paul Allan Oscher (February 26, 1947 – April 18, 2021) was an American blues singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist. Primarily a harmonica player, he was the first permanent white member of Muddy Waters' band.Norman Darwen, "Obituary: Paul Oscher", ''Blues & Rhythm'', No.360, June 2021, pp14-15 Background Oscher was born in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He was married to the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks, from 2001 to 2011. Career He first began playing harmonica at the age of 12. His career as a musician began at the age of 15 when he played for the musician Little Jimmy Mae. He named John Lee Williamson as a major influence. Oscher met Muddy Waters in the mid-1960s. After Big Walter Horton failed to show up for a gig, Oscher played harmonica as a member of the Muddy Waters Blues Band from 1967 until 1972. He was the first white musician in Muddy's band, and lived in Muddy's house on Chicago's South Side, where Oscher shared the basement wi ... [...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] |
Memphis Slim
John Len Chatman (September 3, 1915 – February 24, 1988), known professionally as Memphis Slim, was an American blues pianist, singer, and composer. He led a series of bands that, reflecting the popular appeal of jump blues, included saxophones, bass, drums, and piano. A song he first cut in 1947, "Every Day I Have the Blues", has become a blues standard, recorded by many other artists. He made over 500 recordings. He was posthumously inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1989. Biography Memphis Slim was born John Len Chatman, in Memphis, Tennessee. For his first recordings, for Okeh Records in 1940, he used the name of his father, Peter Chatman (who sang, played piano and guitar, and operated juke joints); it is commonly believed that he did so to honor his father. He started performing under the name "Memphis Slim" later that year but continued to publish songs under the name Peter Chatman. He spent most of the 1930s performing in honky-tonks, dance halls, and gamb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ray Charles
Ray Charles Robinson Sr. (September 23, 1930 – June 10, 2004) was an American singer, songwriter, and pianist. He is regarded as one of the most iconic and influential singers in history, and was often referred to by contemporaries as "The Genius". Among friends and fellow musicians he preferred being called "Brother Ray". Charles was blinded during childhood, possibly due to glaucoma. Charles pioneered the soul music genre during the 1950s by combining blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, and gospel styles into the music he recorded for Atlantic Records. He contributed to the integration of country music, rhythm and blues, and pop music during the 1960s with his crossover success on ABC Records, notably with his two ''Modern Sounds'' albums. While he was with ABC, Charles became one of the first black musicians to be granted artistic control by a mainstream record company. Charles's 1960 hit "Georgia On My Mind" was the first of his three career No. 1 hits on the ''Billboard'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Big Maceo Merriweather
Major Merriweather (March 31, 1905 – February 23, 1953), better known as Big Maceo Merriweather, was an American pianist and blues singer. He was mainly active in Chicago through the 1940s. Career Born in Newnan, Georgia, he was a self-taught pianist. In the 1920s, he moved to Detroit, Michigan, to begin his music career. He moved to Chicago in 1941, where he made the acquaintance of Tampa Red. Red introduced him to Lester Melrose of RCA Victor and its subsidiary label Bluebird Records, who signed Merriweather to a recording contract. His first record was "" (1941), which became a blues |
Pinetop Perkins
Joe Willie "Pinetop" Perkins (July 7, 1913 – March 21, 2011) was an American blues pianist. He played with some of the most influential blues and rock-and-roll performers of his time and received numerous honors, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and induction into the Blues Hall of Fame. Life and career Early career Perkins was born in Belzoni, Mississippi and raised on a plantation in Honey Island, Mississippi. He began his career as a guitarist but then injured the tendons in his left arm in a knife fight with a chorus girl in Helena, Arkansas in the 1940s. Unable to play the guitar, he switched to the piano. He also moved from Robert Nighthawk's radio program on KFFA to Sonny Boy Williamson's ''King Biscuit Time''. He continued working with Nighthawk, however, accompanying him on "Jackson Town Gal" in 1950. In the 1950s, Perkins joined Earl Hooker and began touring. He recorded "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" at Sam Phillips's Sun Studio in Memphis, Tennes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sunnyland Slim
Albert Luandrew (September 5, 1906March 17, 1995), "Blues pianist and singer Sunnyland Slim was born Albert Luandrew in Vance, Mississippi, September 5, 1906 (most sources say 1907, but the Social Security Death Index and 1920 census data give the date as 1906)." known as Sunnyland Slim, was an American blues pianist who was born in the Mississippi Delta and moved to Chicago, helping to make that city a center of postwar blues. Chicago broadcaster and writer Studs Terkel said Sunnyland Slim was "a living piece of our folk history, gallantly and eloquently carrying on in the old tradition". Biography Sunnyland Slim was born on a farm in Quitman County, Mississippi, near the unincorporated settlement of Vance. He moved to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1925, where he performed with many of the popular blues musicians of the day. His stage name came from the song "Sunnyland Train", about a railroad line between Memphis and St. Louis, Missouri. In 1942 he moved to Chicago, in the great m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Otis Spann
Otis Spann (March 21, 1924 or 1930April 24, 1970) was an American blues musician, whom many consider to be the leading postwar Chicago blues pianist. Early life Sources differ over Spann's early years. Some state that he was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1930, but researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc concluded on the basis of census records and other official information that he was born in 1924 in Belzoni, Mississippi. Spann's father was, according to some sources, a pianist called Friday Ford. His mother, Josephine Erby, was a guitarist who had worked with Memphis Minnie and Bessie Smith, and his stepfather, Frank Houston Spann, was a preacher and musician. One of five children, Spann began playing the piano at the age of seven, with some instruction from Friday Ford, Frank Spann, and Little Brother Montgomery.Harris, S. (1981). ''Blues Who's Who''. New York: Da Capo Press. pp. 477–479. . Career By the age of 14, he was playing in bands in the Jackson area. He moved to C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alan Wilson (musician)
Alan Christie Wilson (July 4, 1943 – September 3, 1970), nicknamed "Blind Owl", was an American musician, best known as the co-founder, leader, co-lead singer, and primary composer of the blues band Canned Heat. He sang and played harmonica and guitar with the group live and on recordings. Wilson was the lead singer for the group's two biggest U.S. hit singles: " On the Road Again" and "Going Up the Country". Early years Alan Christie Wilson was born to John (Jack) Wilson (1914–2000), a bricklayer, and Shirley Bingham (1922–2011), an artist on July 4, 1943, and grew up in the Boston suburb of Arlington, Massachusetts. He had an older sister Darrell; and was of English, Scottish, and German descent. His parents divorced when he was 3 and both later remarried. Wilson was highly intelligent, setting him apart from his peers. As a result he was often bullied by his schoolmates. His father Jack enjoyed ham radio operation. Alan became involved as a child but soon turned his in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eastman School Of Music
The Eastman School of Music is the music school of the University of Rochester, a private research university in Rochester, New York. It was established in 1921 by industrialist and philanthropist George Eastman. It offers Bachelor of Music (B.M.) degrees, Master of Arts (M.A.) degrees, Master of Music (M.M.) degrees, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degrees, and Doctor of Musical Arts (D.M.A.) degrees in many musical fields. The school also awards a "Performer's Certificate" or "Artist's Diploma". In 2015, there were more than 900 students enrolled in the collegiate division of the Eastman School (approximately 500 undergraduate and 400 graduate students). Students came from almost every state of the United States, with approximately 25% foreign students. Each year approximately 2000 students apply (1000 undergraduates and 1000 graduates). The acceptance rate was 13% in 2011 and about 1,000 students (ranging in age from 16 years to over 80 years of age) are enrolled in the Eastman ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
