A poem from the 18th Southern Music Issue: Visions of the Blues.
“I didn’t do any research,” Luther Dickinson said with a grin as he opened the door to his room at the Washington Square Park Hotel. Dickinson was in New York for a show that evening at Rockwood Music Hall, and he had agreed to talk with me about a question I’d become obsessed with: Did blues slide guitar evolve from the Hawaiian steel guitar or from the African instrument usually claimed as its ancestor?
A poem from our 18th Southern Music Issue: Visions of the Blues.
Marketing strategies (which, after all, is all that categories are) may rise and fall, but to the democratic listener they are beside the point. The music calls attention to itself, and then takes you somewhere else. It isn’t really any different than going to Memphis was for me in the first place. One thing inevitably leads to another, and before you know it, you are caught up in the ecstatic dance, the ecstatic trance of the music.
George Mitchell’s recordings and photographs of the blues music and culture of Georgia’s Lower Chattahoochee Valley document a once-thriving American musical tradition drawing its last defiant breath.
Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach on Junior Kimbrough’s influence.
“It’s proven most of the time to be true: some of the music that I love the most, that I want to live with forever, are records I didn’t quite get at first, and that was definitely true for Junior. I didn’t understand it at first. It took a few listens. I had to come back to it a couple of times before I got it. And once I got it nothing was ever the same.”
To Adia Victoria, Donald Trump is just the latest thing in the history of American oppression.
“The blues to me is personal music. The blues to me is political. And what’s happening politically right now requires artists to get up, pay attention, report about what’s going on.”
The Memphis Country Blues Festival had a shoestring start in 1966, organized by the Memphis Country Blues Society, an ad hoc group consisting of counterculture figures, musicians, and fans, including Robert Palmer, who would go on to write the seminal book Deep Blues. His daughter, Augusta Palmer, a Brooklyn filmmaker, is seeking to tell the story of the festival in a documentary called The Blues Society.
Highlights from the Oxford American’s 18th Music Issue: “Visions of the Blues.”
Across the 160-page magazine and 23-song CD compilation, we’re celebrating one of the South’s greatest cultural exports: blues music.
Tired of Being Tired, by Ari Gabel, focuses on people of the Mississippi Delta. Inspired by his love for the delta blues, Gabel traveled throughout the region searching for the source of this powerful genre of American music.
