Champion Jack Dupree - Val Milmer - A Journey Through American Music TV - Howard Goodall’s Story of Music TV - Wynton Marsalis - Count Basie - B B King - Etta James - Ken Burns TV - Jimi Hendrix: Guitar Hero TV - Jimi Hendrix - Tom McGuinness - Mick Fleetwood - Keith Richards - Jack White - Eric Clapton - Johnny Winter - Duke Ellington - Muddy Waters - Carlos Santana - Tom Petty - Jon Landau - Bruce Springsteen - Bonnie Raitt - Hugh Laurie - John Lee Hooker - David Edwards - Buddy Guy - Henry Rollins - Walter Mosley - Masters of American Music: Bluesland TV - Martin Scorsese TV - Blues Britannia TV - Blues America TV - The Blues Brothers 1980 - Hugh Laurie - Welcome to Truth: Satanic New World Order Illuminati Conspiracy - What Happened Miss Simone? TV - Searching for Sugar Man 2012 - Reputations TV - Devil at the Crossroads 2019 - Jules Holland TV - Reclaiming Amy TV - Amy Winehouse & Me TV - A Life in Ten Pictures: Amy Winehouse TV - Any Winehouse in Her Own Words TV - Billie: In Search of Billie Holiday TV - Oil City Confidential: The Dr Feelgood Story TV - My Life as a Rolling Stone TV - The Death of Amy Winehouse TV -
I heard Memphis Slim and Muddy Waters say the white man can’t play the Blues. They should never say such a thing as that ... Anybody can play the Blues – white or black. But he can’t feel what I feel. Because he never lived a slave life. He didn’t have nobody to spit in his face and he couldn’t do nuttin’ about it and he’s a man. So this is what the Blues is all about: whisky, women and blues. Champion Jack Dupree, blues master later married & settled Halifax, Yorkshire
Ever since I come into England and er I found England was a heavenly place for me. I don’t care who else finds it difficult. But for me it’s Heaven. When you leave from slavery and go into a place where you are free I couldn’t go back there. Because if anybody spin on me I’ll kill ’em. Everybody here know me including the police so I’m known by everybody here and this is home for me. Champion Jack Dupree
[reviews photograph of Jack Dupree] And on the shelf behind him is his requisites for the day: he’s got some bottles of lager, three different types of whisky, and the bottle of milk is not for his health, it’s mixed with whisky because that lines your stomach. That’s one thing I learned from a lot of the old Blues singers was mixing whisky and milk. Val Wilmer, interview
It’s important to get the history down. Val Wilmer
How exactly did this music made by poor-dirt African-Americans in the dusty fields of the south go on to inspire the likes of the Rolling Stones, Jim Hendrix and Eric Clapton and shape the face of modern rock? A Journey Through American Music, 2007
Robert Johnson’ Love in Vain: in his teens Johnson used to hang around older players like Son House. ibid.
B B King blazed a more sophisticated trail than other delta blues players. ibid.
Until recently B B played upwards of three hundred gigs a year. ibid.
Rock giants such as Eric Clapton, Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac and Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd were all deeply influenced by B B King’s guitar style. ibid.
Ike Turner – he was a member of the band who recorded the ground-breaking track Rocket 88 ... The first true rock-n-roll track. ibid.
Ike Turner started out playing sessions on guitar and piano for the likes of B B King, Howlin’ Wolf, Otis Rush and Buddy Guy. ibid.
Ike claims to remember sneaking a young Elvis Presley into a black club in Memphis and hiding him behind his piano. ibid.
In 1956 Ike met a young singer called Anna Mae Bullock. She soon became Tina Turner and they had their first hit together, A Fool for Love, in 1960. ibid.
Ike also played piano on the album Demon Days by the cartoon band Gorillaz. ibid.
Blind Lemon Jefferson – it carried on through T-Bone Walker ... and then Clarence Gatemouth Brown. ibid.
Gatemouth was a master of both the fiddle and the guitar and combined blues, country, jazz and Cajun influences. ibid.
Frank Zappa said Gatemouth was the guitarist he admired the most. ibid.
Mississippi natives Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Walters pioneered a beefy amplified sound which helped them cut through the noise of crowded city bars. ibid.
Clapton has said that Buddy Guy is the best guitarist alive. Others see him as the link between blues and rock. ibid.
The fiery blues soul singer Etta James ... Etta also pointed forward to both the Soul divas of the Sixties and Rock belters such as Janis Joplin. ibid.
Etta is now drug-free and recently underwent an operation to help her lose 200 pounds. She is now singing better than ever. ibid.
And so the Blues grew from its Mississippi roots and began to spread its influence far and away. ibid.
Blues – flattened thirds and sevenths. Howard Goodall’s Story of Music: The Age of Rebellion
Louis Armstrong invented a new style of playing. Louis Armstrong created the coherent solo. Louis Armstrong fused the sound of the blues with popular American song. Louis Armstrong extended the range of the trumpet. Louis Armstrong created the melodic and rhythmic vocabulary all of the big bands wrote music out of. Wynton Marsalis
When you hear Billie Holiday sing you hear the spirit of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong together in a person ... A very profound sensitivity to the human condition. She tells you something about the pain of the blues. Of life. But inside that pain is the toughness. And that’s what you’re attracted to. Wynton Marsalis
Everything comes out in blues music: joy, pain, struggle. Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance. It’s about a man and a woman. So the pain and the struggle in the blues is that universal pain that comes from having your heart broken. Most blues songs are not about social statements. Wynton Marsalis
Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It’s a 12-bar form that’s played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that’s been used by rock-n-roll. It’s related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition. Wynton Marsalis
The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It’s in New Orleans music, it’s in jazz, it’s in country music, it’s in gospel. Wynton Marsalis
I can never get tired of playing the blues. Count Basie
Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy’s playing blues like we play, he’s in high school. When he starts playing jazz it’s like going on to college, to a school of higher learning. B B King
The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn’t know how other people would take it. B B King
I liked blues from the time my mother used to take me to church. I started to listen to gospel music, so I liked that. But I had an aunt at that time, my mother’s aunt who bought records by people like Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and a few others. B B King
If you want to be a good blues singer, people are going to be down on you, so dress like you’re going to the bank to borrow money. B B King
Jazz took too much discipline. You have to come in at the right place, which is different than me singing the blues, where I can sing, ‘Oh, baby’ if there’s a pause in the melody. With jazz, you better leave that space open, or put in something real cool. Etta James
About the same time New Orleans’ musicians began to hear the Blues. Ken Burns, Jazz: The Gift: Gumbo: Beginnings to 1917, PBS 2001
‘The most incredible blues guitar I’d ever heard.’ Jimi Hendrix: Guitar Hero, Sky Arts 2012
Blues is easy to play but hard to feel. Jimi Hendrix
See, that’s nothing but blues, that’s all I’m singing about. It’s today’s blues. Jimi Hendrix
As to whether we can ever begin to emulate the people who really began it – the Robert Johnsons, the Howlin’ Wolfs, the Muddy Waters – no. Tom McGuinness
When it’s well-put and well-performed it’s infectious. Mick Fleetwood