Decades ago, a fellow blues enthusiast sent me a package of official papers related to the life of Fulton Allen, who recorded as Blind Boy Fuller. Written during the 1930s by government officials, social workers, and physicians, these documents offer unique insight into the life of a legendary Southern bluesman. The stories they tell of poverty, ill health, and unhappiness with management and record companies are as blues-inducing as Blind Boy Fuller’s darkest recordings. To ensure their accuracy, all of the quotations in my account retain the parlance and punctuation …

A singing street-corner evangelist, Blind Willie Johnson created some of the most intensely moving records of the 20th century. Void of frivolity or uncertainty, his 78s from the 1920s and ’30s are clearly the work of a pained believer seeking redemption. A slide guitarist nonpareil, Johnson had an exquisite sense of timing and tone, using a pocketknife or ring slider to duplicate his vocal inflections or to produce an unforgettable phrase from a single strike of a string. Eric Clapton cites his “It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine” as “probably the …

Papa Charlie Jackson was the first commercially successful male blues singer. A relaxed, confident crooner and seasoned 6-string stylist, he launched his recording career in 1924 and became one of Paramount’s more popular artists, releasing 33 discs by 1930. His classic versions of “Salty Dog,” “Shake That Thing,” “Alabama Bound,” and “Spoonful” set the template for many covers that followed. Playing fingerstyle or with a flatpick, Papa Charlie conjured a strong, staccato attack on his big guitar-banjo. His unstoppable rhythms were perfectly suited for dancing, and along with his label …

John Hammond, father of the bluesman with the same name, was a towering figure of 20th-century recorded music. Born into the Vanderbilt family, Hammond was an unsurpassed talent scout and unswerving advocate of racial integration in music. Within a year of joining Columbia Records in late 1932, he produced 78s by the Fletcher Henderson, Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins, Chick Webb, and Benny Goodman orchestras, as well as with the Joe Venuti Blue Six, Chocolate Dandies, Teddy Wilson, and Bessie Smith. He also discovered an unknown 17-year-old singer named Billie Holiday …

The passionate, hard-driving blues song “Dust My Broom” has been filling dance floors and exhilarating listeners for more than 60 years. The song’s been covered by countless performers – a quick search on youtube turns up versions by Robert Johnson, Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, The Yardbirds, Fleetwood Mac, Johnny Winter, Canned Heat, Ike and Tina Turner, Taj Mahal, Freddie King, Luther Allison, Junior Brown and Warren Haynes, R.L. Burnside, Duwayne Burnside, James Son Thomas, ZZ Top, Gary Moore, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, G. Love, Todd Rundgren, and the list goes …

Blind Lemon Jefferson, who began recording for Paramount Records in late 1925, became the most famous bluesman of the Roaring Twenties. His 78s shattered racial barriers, becoming popular from coast to coast and influencing a generation of musicians. His best songs forged original, imagistic themes with inventive arrangements and brilliantly improvised solos. Portraits of Afro-American life during the early 1900s, his lyrics create a unique body of poetry – humorous and harrowing, jivey and risqué, a stunning view of society from the perspective of someone at the bottom. To this day, …

Long before becoming a force in Chicago blues, Johnny Shines hoboed with Robert Johnson through Depression-era America. They hopped freights, played on street corners, shared rooms and whiskey, and made it as far north as Canada. Johnson, the Mississippi Delta’s most celebrated blues performer, perished in 1938, and for the next half-century, his spirit haunted the music of Johnny Shines. It echoed in his turnarounds, mournful bottleneck slides, impassioned lyrics, and falsetto moans. At clubs, house parties, and other gatherings, Johnny Shines was just as likely to launch into Johnson’s …

On assignment for Blues Revue Quarterly, I journeyed to John Lee Hooker’s home in Redwood City, California, on December 29, 1992. I’d sold the magazine on a cover story that was to be entitled “Spinning the Blues with John Lee Hooker.” I brought along some records that included the earliest 78s made by T-Bone Walker and B.B. King, two of Hooker’s initial releases, and one of the filthiest – and funniest – blues songs ever recorded, Lucille Bogan’s “Shave ’Em Dry.” Hooker liked the idea of a “listening party,” and …

Columbia Records came to Atlanta in November 1926 and recorded a variety of spiritual acts and blues guitarist Peg Leg Howell. Born in 1888 in Eatonton, Georgia, Joshua Barnes Howell was a generation older than most of the prewar Atlanta bluesmen. Like Lead Belly and old Henry Thomas in Texas, his repertoire extended to country reels, field hollers, ballads, and other pre-blues styles. He attended school through ninth grade and learned how to play guitar in 1909. In an interview with George Mitchell, the researcher who rediscovered him in 1963, …

While Peg Leg Howell and His Gang tended to sound countrified, Barbecue Bob, his brother Laughing Charley, and Curley Weaver pushed Atlanta blues in new directions. The three had grown up together in the cottonfield country around Walnut Grove, Georgia. Charlie Hicks, often identified as “Laughing Charley” on records, was born in 1900. His brother Robert was 18 months his junior. They were sons of sharecroppers, as was their neighbor Curley James Weaver, four years younger than Robert. Curley’s mother, Savannah “Dip” Weaver, played guitar and piano in church. Old …