Blues, Rags & Hollers

[Roundneck]

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Mance Lipscomb was an influential blues singer, guitarist and songster. Born Beau De Glen Lipscomb near Navasota, Texas, he as a youth took the name of 'Mance' from a friend of his oldest brother Charlie (Mance short for emancipation). Lipscomb was the son of an ex-slave from Alabama and a half Choctaw Indian mother.

Lipscomb spent most of his life working as a tenant farmer in Texas and was "discovered" and recorded in 1960 during the country blues revival. He released many albums of blues, ragtime and folk music, singing and accompanying himself on acoustic guitar.He had a fine finger-picking guitar technique, and an expressive voice well suited to his material.

[Roundneck]

Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton was an American ragtime pianist, bandleader and composer.

Widely recognized as a pivotal figure in early jazz, Morton claimed, in self-promotional hyperbole, to have invented jazz outright in 1902.

Morton was the first serious composer of jazz, naming and popularizing the so-called "Spanish tinge" of exotic rhythms and penning such standards as "Wolverine Blues", "Black Bottom Stomp", and "I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say".

[Roundneck]

Sam "Lightnin’" Hopkins was a country blues guitarist, from Houston, Texas, United States.

Hopkins' style was born from spending many hours playing informally without a backing band. His distinctive fingerstyle playing often included playing, in effect, bass, rhythm, lead, percussion, and vocals, all at the same time. He played both "alternating" and "monotonic" bass styles incorporating imaginative, often chromatic turnarounds and single note lead lines. Tapping or slapping the body of his guitar added rhythmic accompaniment.

Much of Hopkins' music follows the standard 12-bar blues template but his phrasing was very free and loose. Many of his songs were in the talking blues style, but he was a powerful and confident singer. Lyrically his songs chronicled the problems of life in the segregated south, bad luck in love and other usual subjects of the blues idiom. He did however deal with these subjects with humor and good nature. Many of his songs are filled with double entendres and he was known for his humorous introductions.

[Roundneck]

Big Joe Williams was an American Delta blues musician and songwriter, known for his characteristic style of guitar-playing, his nine-string guitar, and his bizarre, cantankerous personality.

Big Joe was the archetypal wandering blues singer, playing everywhere from hobo jungles to concert halls. No matter how far hisjourneys took him, Joe always gravitated back to the tiny east Mississippi hamlet of Crawford where he was born and would die. Big Joe’s complex primitivism was perfectly complemented by his unique instrument, a nine-string guitar.

[Roundneck]

Fred McDowell, often known as Mississippi Fred McDowell, was a blues singer and guitar player in the North Mississippi style.

While commonly lumped together with "Delta Blues singers," McDowell actually may be considered the first of the bluesmen from the North Mississippi region - parallel to, but somewhat east of the Delta region - to achieve widespread recognition for his work. A version of the state’s signature musical form somewhat closer in structure to its African roots (often eschewing the chord change for the hypnotic effect of the droning, single chord vamp).

[serpentboy]

"The blues is the roots; everything else is the fruits." - Willie Dixon.

[Roundneck]

Aye! your right!

[Roundneck]

Papa Charlie Jackson was an early American bluesman and songster. He played a hybrid guitar banjo and ukulele, his recording career beginning in 1924. Much of his life remains a mystery, but it is probable that he was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and died in Chicago, Illinois in 1938.

His importance in the history of the blues has been lessened by several factors. His flair for unique and irreverent material, similar to that of Charley Patton, along with his fast upbeat tempo which made his records sell, did not fit into the traditional blues category. His records were of poor quality since about half of his 66 sides were recorded with an acoustic horn, not a microphone. The rest contained a lot of "hiss" since Paramount used inferior quality materials in their pressing of records. Also, his banjo was not viewed as a traditional blues instrument. However, no one has duplicated his unique performances.

[IMG]http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_T64CgXT5p-I/RysQaf5h3bI/AAAAAAAAAu4/mJt6VUXK548*******Jackson.gif[/IMG]

[mune01]

santana. . hehehe. . .blues mana cya db?

[Roundneck]

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