To say that Joan Osborne is pleased to be co-headlining with Mavis Staples, one of her strongest influences, would be a gross understatement. Both strong women are at the peaks of their careers as their new tour kicks off.
Author: Don Wilcock
Don Wilcock
Now into his second half century as the warrior music journalist, Don Wilcock began his career writing “Sounds from The World” in Vietnam, a weekly reader’s digest of pop music news for grunts in the field for the then largest official Army newspaper in the world, The Army Reporter. He’s edited BluesWax, FolkWax, The King Biscuit Times, Elmore Magazine, and also BluesPrint as founder of the Northeast Blues Society. Internationally, he’s written for The Blues Foundation’s Blues Music Awards program, Blues Matters and Blues World. He wrote the definitive Buddy Guy biography 'Damn Right I’ve Got The Blues,' and is currently writing copy for a coffee table book of watercolor paintings of blues artists by Clint Herring.
IBC winning guitarist, singer and songwriter Zak Harmon’s road from the Mississippi Delta to L.A. to acclaim as a singer is powerfully coming full circle.
I never thought I’d call a blues band “authentic” that splashed a heavy dollup of Ramones punk attitude onto a bed of alien invasion smoothy guitars, but Ted Drozdowski’s Scissormen are unquestionably authentic.
Blues is an old man’s game. Rock and roll is about youthful aggression. The Rolling Stones, now all in their early to mid-70s, don’t play by either genre’s rules, but meet the two in the middle.
if Muddy’s performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1958 didn’t cement that reputation on film, the Sony Legacy DVD Soundstage Blues Summit in Chicago, 1974 does.
Robert Johnson may be the father of the blues and Muddy Waters may have established the blues template for the electric crossover of today’s rock stars, and Buddy Guy may yet eclipse the King as the most recognized blues performer, but no one will ever take B.B. King’s crown as King of the Blues. His influences range from preachers to jazz giants, from Delta sharecropping guitar pickers to the King of Rock and Roll. His friends include U. S. Presidents, Popes, and rock stars from The Beatles to U2. He is far and away the gentlest, sweetest blues man I…
Luther Allison’s son Bernard used to hide in the closet when Johnny Winter came over to the house because he was afraid of the albino with pink eyes…
Warren Haynes has an exclusive, telling conversation about challenging new Mule material, the high profile end of one prolific band, and three decades on the scene as one of the hardest working, most prolific and most ubiquitous guitarists to crisscross musical genres.
Dennis McNally’s ah-ha moment in deciding to write his book, On Highway 61 – Music, Race and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom, came after Bob Dylan’s comments.
Festival logic says that the headliners are the high point of the show, that the last night is the capstone, that buskers are acts not ready for prime time, but not King Biscuit!