Blues Music Greats – The Granddaddies of Popular Music

It is difficult to imagine someone who has never heard of Elvis Presley, the Beatles, or the Rolling Stones. They were the pioneers of modern, popular music. Even though all these musicians derived their styles from and grew up listening to blues music, it is not difficult to find someone who has never heard of Robert Johnson or Son House. The early blues masters are long gone and due to the fact that their recordings are rare it is paramount that we make an effort to remember them and as such our own musical heritage. I would even venture to say that just listening to any of the late blues masters is probably the best blues guitar lesson one could ever have.

Bessie Smith

Bessie Smith was known as “The Empress of the Blues.” She was probably the most famous female singer in the 1920s. Fluent in both jazz and blues, Smith sold hundreds of thousands of records which was a phenominal feat for those days. During the peak of her career she performed in theaters and hotel ballrooms across the country. Smith recorded with Benny Goodman before dying in an auto accident in 1937.

Big Bill Broonzy

Big Bill Broonzy brought the blues to Chicago and helped to establish that city’s sound. Born on the banks of the Mississippi River then moving to Chicago as a teenager in 1920, Broonzy began recording in the mid-1920s and by the early-1930s he was an established figure on the Chicago blues scene, performing alongside Tampa Red and John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson. Broonzy could play both the older vaudeville style and the emerging Chicago style. e was a smooth vocalist, an excellent guitar player, and songwriter. When the post-war blues boom rendered Broonzy’s quaint homegrown style a thing of the past, he re-invented himself as a singer of authentic folk-blues and became one of the first blues artists to tour Europe.

Blind Lemon Jefferson

The founding father of Texas blues, Blind Lemon Jefferson was one of the most commercially successful artists of the 1920s. He was a huge influence on younger players such as Lightnin’ Hopkins and T-Bone Walker. Born blind, Jefferson taught himself to play the guitar and was able to support a wife and child with his skill. Jefferson played for awhile with Leadbelly, and is said to have traveled to the Mississippi Delta, Memphis, and Chicago to perform. Although Jefferson’s recording career was brief, he was able to record over 100 songs including such classics as “Matchbox Blues,” “Black Snake Moan” and “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” Jefferson’s songs have been recorded by Bob Dylan, Peter Case, John Hammond, Jr., and many others.

Charley Patton

Charley Patton was a flashy performer. His guitar playing and flamboyant showmanship inspired the likes of Son House, Robert Johnson, as well as the father of rock guitar, Jimi Hendrix. Patton lived large, loved his liquor and the women. His played at parties, juke joints, and plantation dances and became the stuff of legend. His loud voice, coupled with a rhythmic and percussive guitar style was both groundbreaking and engineered to entertain rowdy audiences. Patton laid down some 60 songs in less than five years including his best-selling first single “Pony Blues.”

Leadbelly

Leadbelly’s music and tumultuous life had a profound effect on both blues and folk musicians alike. Like most performers of of the 1930s through the 1940s, Leadbelly’s music extended beyond the blues and incorporated ragtime, country, folk, popular standards, and even gospel songs. Leadbelly’s hot temper often got him in trouble, he was even sentenced to prison once. While in prison, Leadbelly wrote a song for the governor that led to his early release.

Leadbelly was then convicted of an assault charge and sentenced to several years in Louisiana’s Angola Penitentiary. Here, Leadbelly met and recorded for Library of Congress musicologists John and Alan Lomax. After his release, Leadbelly moved to New York City and began to hang with folk artists. At this time the scene there was becoming quite well known due to works by the folk giants Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and Leadbelly fit right in. After his death from ALS in 1949, Leadbelly songs like “Goodnight, Irene,” “Midnight Special,” “The Rock Island Line” and several others became hits for artists such as Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, the Weavers, and Ernest Tubb.

Lonnie Johnson

Lonnie Johnson was in a class all his own. With a sense of melody unmatched by pre-war players, Johnson was equally capable of knocking out both dirty blues and fluid jazz phrasings, and he invented the practice of combining rhythmic passages and solo leads within a single song. Growing up in New Orleans, Johnson’s talent was seeped in the city’s rich musical heritage, but after the flu epidemic of 1919 he moved to St. Louis.

Signing with Okeh Records in 1925, Johnson recorded an estimated 130 songs over the next seven years, including several groundbreaking duets with Blind Willie Dunn. During this period, Johnson also recorded with the Duke Ellington Orchestra and Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five. After the Depression, Johnson landed in Chicago, recording for Bluebird Records and, later, King Records. Although he scored few chart hits of his own, Johnson’s songs and playing style influenced both blues legend Robert Johnson (no relation) and jazz great Charlie Christian. Johnson’s songs have since been recorded by Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Robert Johnson

Born: May 8, 1911 Hazlehurst MS
Died: August 16, 1938 Greenwood MS

Most blues enthusiasts have heard of Robert Johnson. Many also know the tale of Johnson making a deal with the devil at the crossroads outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi to acquire his skill and fame. Regardless of what really happened, one fact remains – Robert Johnson is the cornerstone artist of the blues. Many of his songs, like “Love In Vain,” “Sweet Home Chicago” and “Terraplane Blues,” have become blues standards. Toss in his early death (1911-1938) and the aura of mystery that surrounds his life, and you have a bluesman ready-made to appeal to a generation of blues-influenced rockers like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.

Son House

Son House was an innovator. He had a haunting singing voice, and a powerful presence for which he became quite well known during the 1920s and ’30s. He traveled extensively with his friend and colleague Charley Patton, who introduced him to his contacts at Paramount Records. House was also a lay preacher and remained conflicted throughout his career, with one foot in the Gospel and one in the “wicked” world of the blues. His early records did not sell so House basically retired from recording for the better part of a decade.

House’s few recordings remain among the most collectible and expensive early blues recordings. The few 78s that are available are the result of a Library of Congress musicologist named Alan Lomax. Lomax had caught wind of House’s unique style and traveled a long way to Mississippi to record him in the early 40′s. House disappeared in 1943 until he was rediscovered by a trio of blues researchers in 1964 in Rochester, New York. With the help of fan and future Canned Heat founder Al Wilson, House continued where he’d left off and became part of the 60′s folk-blues revival, performing live and recording into the early-1970s.

Tampa Red

Known during the 1920s and ’30s as “The Guitar Wizard,” Tampa Red developed a unique slide-guitar style that was picked up and expanded upon by Robert Nighthawk, Chuck Berry, and Duane Allman, among others. Born as Hudson Whitaker, he earned the nickname “Tampa Red” for his bright red hair and upbringing in Florida. Moving to Chicago in the mid-1920s, Red teamed up with pianist Tom Dorsey as “The Hokum Boys,” scoring a big hit with the song “It’s Tight Like That,” popularizing the bawdy blues style known as “hokum.”

When Dorsey turned to Gospel music in 1930, Red continued as a solo artist, performed with Big Bill Broonzy, and helped recent Delta immigrants to Chicago with food, shelter and bookings. Like many pre-war blues artists, Tampa Red found his career eclipsed by younger performers in the 1950s.

Tommy Johnson

Some say that it was the underrated Tommy Johnson that actually met with the devil at the crossroads one dark and stormy night, hoping to strike a deal, not Robert Johnson. No one is really sure what happened at those crossroads however we do know that Tommy Johnson has become a mere footnote in the blues genre, beloved by hardcore fans but remaining relatively unknown while Johnson soared to stardom.

With a primal voice that could rise from a guttural howl to an ethereal falsetto throughout the course of a song, this Johnson also possessed a complex and technically-advanced guitar-playing style that would influence a generation of Mississippi blues men, including Howlin’ Wolf and Robert Nighthawk. Tommy Johnson only recorded briefly, from 1928-1930, and “Complete Recorded Works” (Document Records) includes the artist’s entire recorded catalog. Johnson was a severe alcoholic his entire adult life and died in 1956 in obscurity.

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