Word: bluesman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIED. CLARENCE (GATEMOUTH) BROWN, 81, master roots guitarist and fiddler who fought being labeled a bluesman and insisted his "American music"--which incorporated jazz, country, R&B and Cajun--defied categorization; two weeks after evacuating his home in Slidell, La., which was razed by Hurricane Katrina; in Orange, Texas. Nicknamed for his deep voice, he got his break in the late 1940s at Houston's Bronze Peacock club when T-Bone Walker fell ill and Brown jumped onstage and began riffing. ("I made $600 in 15 minutes," he boasted.) A collaborator with artists from Eric Clapton to Roy Clark...
...city is celebrating what officials bill as the "50th Anniversary of Rock 'n' Roll," pegging it not to Rocket 88 but to one made three years later: Elvis Presley's July 5th, 1954 recording of That's All Right, a cover of a song previously released by its composer, bluesman Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, in 1946. This is certainly not all right...
When Jack White isn't singing, he may be the most thoroughly unendurable rock star since Sting. White insists that he and drummer Meg White are brother and sister (they're actually ex-husband and wife); he also considers himself a modern bluesman, wears his red band uniform offstage and uses the liner notes of his new album, Elephant, for a jeremiad on "the death of the sweetheart." He's like a vigilante grad student holding a highlighter pen to your throat--except when he sings. Jack White can really sing...
DIED. JOHN LEE HOOKER, 83, Mississippi Delta bluesman whose impassioned, resonant voice and urgent electric-guitar riffs influenced modern rock 'n' roll and inspired such musicians as Van Morrison, the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton; in Los Altos, Calif. The son of a sharecropper and one of 11 children, Hooker ran away from home at 14 to make music in Memphis, Tenn., and didn't stop until 1997--more than 100 albums later. In 1989 Hooker won his first of four Grammy Awards for a version of his 1951 million-selling single, I'm in the Mood, which he rerecorded...
...Like the sea, like the sky, like a pair of Levi's, like that Miles Davis song, Hooker was all blues. In fact, Miles once said that Hooker was so infused with the sound of the Delta that he described the bluesman as "buried up to his neck in mud." Hooker wasn't all blues all by himself: there was Blind Lemon Jefferson and Charley Patton before him, B.B. King and Muddy Waters right there with him, and many, many performers after him. Early in their careers, the Rolling Stones opened for Hooker. Early in his career, Bob Dylan shared...