NICK DERISO: Harp player Rice Miller — better known as Sonny Boy Williamson II — used to sludge across Weston’s yard on the way to parties and dances, a leather belt festooned with harmonicas strapped across his chest. Robert Johnson’s stepson, Robert Jr. Lockwood, was the first guitar player thatRead More

The concert had been over for hours, forever. But B.B. King was just getting started.

NICK DERISO: The story goes: Someone asked Fats Waller what jazz is. His reply? “If you don’t know, don’t mess with it.” Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown messed with it on “Just Got Lucky,” and with fine results. In fact, it seemed his string-bending solos found themselves most at home in theRead More

Next to Sly and the Family Stone and James Brown there might not be another act as influential to funk music than P-Funk, the shorthand name for George Clinton’s twin ensembles Parliament (horns) and Funkadelic (no horns). In fact, they were cited in my last OTM as an influence toRead More

NICK DERISO: A trip through the Mississippi Delta this week had me thinking about the old Rooster Blues Records label. Located from 1988-98 inside the Delta Record Mart on Sunflower Avenue in Clarksdale, Rooser Blues releases can still be found in a riverboat-shaped downtown building called Dela’s Stackhouse. “Coahoma theRead More

In anybody else’s hands, this new Mavis Staples album would have been a museum piece, interesting but ultimately dust-covered and remote. Not that “We’ll Never Turn Back” (to be issued on Tuesday by Anti- records) doesn’t have plenty of right things to say, and certainly plenty of righteous things, inRead More

The lead-off track from Anders Osbourne’s Grammy-nominated ‘Living Room’ is a rootsy jam and a helluva good time.

NICK DERISO: Guitarist Buddy Guy, a Baton Rouge-area native, has a presence hardly in need of defining. From bar-walking solos (thanks to that old 150-foot amp chord), to his clean, percussive style on a polka-dot guitar, Guy has since the 1960s cut a wide swath, image-wise. Yet “Southern Blues” illuminatesRead More

Many is the legend with a forgotten sideman who helped make him great. Count among them Johnnie Johnson, the sleeper pick’s sleeper. See, you’ve been listening to him for years, as the barreling bar-room pianist in those old Chuck Berry records. Do yourself a favor, if you love that earlyRead More

by Pico Writing about underpublicized blueswoman Rory Block has got me thinking about another blues lady who needs no introduction at all. Everyone knows and respects Bonnie Raitt so much that her gender has long ago ceased to raise questions as to whether she can play with the big boys.Read More