by S. Victor Aaron Born in the Mississippi Delta town of Leland, MS just a few miles west of BB King‘s hometown of Indianola, Wadada Leo Smith didn’t pick up a guitar and started singing the blues but his mark on music ended up having a worldwide impact, anyway. After trying out the French horn, drums and mellophone, young Leo [...]
by Nick DeRiso An honorable, if ultimately somewhat superficial, tribute to the thing that makes Robert “Jr.” Lockwood such an important element to modern blues. Lockwood was something of a stepson to Robert Johnson. The doomed Delta bluesman would stop in to stay with Lockwood’s mother in Helena, Ark., during early 1930s road trips along the chitlin’ circuit, and they [...]
by Nick DeRiso Refined, yet deliciously groovy, 72-year-old Johnnie Bassett’s music — and his bearing — belies his family’s rascally bootlegger roots. It’s perhaps no surprise, though, that many of the more well-known Florida-area bluesmen of the Prohibition era — Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red — would stop by to sample the product. A young Bassett got [...]
by Nick DeRiso An updated excerpt from a multi-artist piece I had published as part of the statewide Louisiana Folklife Festival’s program book in 1995. Thomas suffered a fatal heart attack later that same year, in his hometown of Shreveport, La., ending a career that spanned seven decades: On his old records, Jesse “Baby Face” Thomas is a whispering recollection [...]
by Nick DeRiso It’s fitting, of course, that singer/songwriter/keyboardist Leon Russell’s real last name is “bridges.” Claude Russell Bridges, born April 2, 1942, would one day write a tune called “The Masquerade” that, in jazz singer and guitarist George Benson‘s hands, hit No. 1 simultanously on the jazz, pop and R&B charts. It’s the footnote on Russell that got a [...]
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