Browsing: C.C. Rider

This is the latest from The Bluesmobile’s C.C. Rider, who spends her life venerating the founding fathers of the blues.…

“Pretty Woman” is Roy Orbison’s biggest hit, the best known of all his songs. It took the already famous Orbison and rocketed him to a whole new stratosphere.

It might be a luxury tax, might be a sales tax, might be an emotional tax you gotta pay the one you love.

Mississippi born and Alabama raised. She started her recording career in 1923, which makes her one of the first of the blues babes on wax…

For starters, he was one of the greatest radio personalities ever. And when Rufus wasn’t on the radio hootin’ and howlin’, he was promotin’, singin’, dancin’, and writing songs…

What’s the name Pink Floyd mean? Ever wonder where it came from? How did those two words come together? What if I told you the origin of the name Pink Floyd is buried in the blues…

Young Will Shade was a Memphis-born musician who played a bunch of instruments. A serious harmonica player. He’d been dabbling for a while when he heard a recording of a new type of music by a group called the Dixieland Jug Blowers. Hearing that, Will knew he could make a living by rustling up some street musicians from his hometown. And so the Memphis Jug Band was born…

As a kid, Elmore James taught himself to play guitar by stringing up a broom wire on the side of his house. Fitting, that a broom wire would be the origin of what some say is the most recognizable lick in the blues…

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.