Browsing: The Bluesmobile

Young Will Shade was a Memphis-born musician who played a bunch of instruments. A serious harmonica player. He’d been dabbling for a while when he heard a recording of a new type of music by a group called the Dixieland Jug Blowers. Hearing that, Will knew he could make a living by rustling up some street musicians from his hometown. And so the Memphis Jug Band was born…

As a kid, Elmore James taught himself to play guitar by stringing up a broom wire on the side of his house. Fitting, that a broom wire would be the origin of what some say is the most recognizable lick in the blues…

It stretches for almost two miles, rising right up out of the Mississippi River. Beale Street. It’s where gamblers lived and died, hookers hooked and killers got away with it. For the first half of the 20thcentury, there was nowhere else you’d rather be….

Until August 10, 1920, record companies didn’t even try to sell music to—or by—black people. But on that day Mamie Smith, a 37-year-old medicine show singer from Cincinnati, barreled into a New York studio.

It was 1969, Zeppelin recorded a track for their album Led Zeppelin II. A song they took credit for writing, called “Bring it On Home.” You may know it. Goes like this. Great song. One problem though – they didn’t write it.

It all started with a flat on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit and an 800 dollar loan. Former boxer and Korean War Vet Berry Gordy had a dream…to create a place where a black kid could quote “walk off the street into the studio and leave a polished performer.”

The Chocolate Drops were just following the example of the string bands that came before them. Like Chatmon Family, who made up the Mississippi Sheiks. Dom Flemons has more.

We don’t know much about him. We’re not even sure of his real name. What we know we get from his music. We know that he was good at guitar. Really good.

You may not know her name, but if you know the blues on Beale Street, you know Hattie Hart. Remembered now for her work with the Memphis Jug Band in the 1920s.

The blues is all about gettin’ through tough times. About surviving. Surviving poverty, inequality, and hard labor.