Author: C.C. Rider
C.C. Rider
C.C. Rider, who spends her life venerating the founding fathers of the blues. She’s walked the crooked highways of this singing country to resurrect the voices of the past. With the dirt of the Delta on her hands, she sleeps in the shadow of the giants on whose shoulders popular music now stands.
It stretches for almost two miles, rising right up out of the Mississippi River. Beale Street. It’s where gamblers lived and died, hookers hooked and killers got away with it. For the first half of the 20thcentury, there was nowhere else you’d rather be….
Until August 10, 1920, record companies didn’t even try to sell music to—or by—black people. But on that day Mamie Smith, a 37-year-old medicine show singer from Cincinnati, barreled into a New York studio.
It was 1969, Zeppelin recorded a track for their album Led Zeppelin II. A song they took credit for writing, called “Bring it On Home.” You may know it. Goes like this. Great song. One problem though – they didn’t write it.
It all started with a flat on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit and an 800 dollar loan. Former boxer and Korean War Vet Berry Gordy had a dream…to create a place where a black kid could quote “walk off the street into the studio and leave a polished performer.”
The Chocolate Drops were just following the example of the string bands that came before them. Like Chatmon Family, who made up the Mississippi Sheiks. Dom Flemons has more.
We don’t know much about him. We’re not even sure of his real name. What we know we get from his music. We know that he was good at guitar. Really good.
You may not know her name, but if you know the blues on Beale Street, you know Hattie Hart. Remembered now for her work with the Memphis Jug Band in the 1920s.
The blues is all about gettin’ through tough times. About surviving. Surviving poverty, inequality, and hard labor.
In the early ‘20s a Vaudeville guitar player named George Beauchamp paid a visit to a stringed instrument shop. His complaint: no matter how loud he played, his guitar just couldn’t compete with the rest of the instruments in the orchestra.
So, the owner of that shop, John Dopyera, developed the idea of fitting a guitar body with aluminum cones. Discs of fine-spun aluminum that vibrate to amplify sound. Make the body out of metal, and you’ve got a National guitar.
Black Hat. Dark Sunglasses. Sound like a Blues Brother to you? It is. The original Blues Brother. Inspiration to Jake and Elwood. Master songwriter, electric guitar titan, best-selling bluesman…John Lee Hooker.