Remembering lesser-known sides from Muddy Waters harpist Little Walter, who hurtled his instrument forward before dying today in 1968.

You can’t dig too deeply into blues, as Steve Earle is doing these days, without a teeth-splintering clang of your shovel against Robert Johnson’s legend.

This lead song from ‘Muddy Wolf at Red Rocks’ makes clear the difficulty Joe Bonamassa — really, anybody — has in taking on Muddy Waters.

Lean and hurtful, anthemic and damaged, Alabama Shakes’ “Don’t Wanna Fight” pulls no punches — not musically, not emotionally.

The opening track from Steve Earle’s upcoming ‘Terraplane,’ a chugging Howlin’ Wolf-esque electric blues, works on two levels.

The Florida-based JJ Grey and Mofro return to make an absolutely heavenly, cross-pollinated racket — like a bourbon tabernacle hootenanny.

Eleven hours into work on ‘Another Good Road,’ John Oates decided to cover his old favorite ‘Stack O’ Lee.’ It proved more difficult than he’d imagined.

A previously unheard song finds Lead Belly singing about an event both literally and figuratively a world away from his life in the piney woods.

Something Else! remembers multi-faceted guitarist Jeff Golub, who succumbed to progressive supranuclear palsy today at just 59 years old.

Markus James, Deerhoof, Dave Liebman, Don Pullen and Arild Anderson are included in S. Victor Aaron’s Top Unreviewed Records of 2014.