Η Φωτογραφία της ημέρας.

[The Rebel]

The blues they sang… we still still feel today.

[The Rebel]

Lead Belly.



Huddie William Ledbetter.
(January 20, 1888 – December 6, 1949)

“… And now everybody have the blues. Sometimes, they don’t know what it is. But when you lay down at night, turn from one side of the bed all night to the other and you can’t sleep, what’s the matter? Blues has got you. Or when you get up in the mornin’, sit on the side of the bed, may have a mother or father, sister or brother, boyfriend or girlfriend, husband or wife around. You don’t want no talk out of ’em. They ain’t done you nothin’, you ain’t done them nothin’. What’s the matter, blues got you. Well, you get up and shove your feet down under the table and look down in your place, may have chicken and rice, take my advice, you walk away and shake your head, you say, ‘Lord have mercy. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep.’ What’s the matter? Why, the blues got you. They want to talk to you. You got to tell ’em something.” - Lead Belly.

[The Rebel]

Blind Boy Fuller.
(July 10, 1904 – February 13, 1941).



“Sixty years ago, a slight, neatly dressed black man stood on the corner of Seventh and Patterson Streets in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was playing his guitar and singing ragtimey blues.
This guitar player was Blind Boy Fuller. He would become one of four great Piedmont bluesmen who were then all making the circuit of the North Carolina tobacco towns like Winston­ Salem, Greensboro, Durham, and Raleigh, during the Depression. The other three–Reverend Gary Davis, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGee–all had long and successful careers, especially Terry and McGee. Blind Boy Fuller, though, was a blues musician for little more than ten years, but his influence and the memory of him and his music have lasted a long time.” - Doyle M. Pace.
(Originally published in the August 1996 Blues News.)

[The Rebel]

B.B. King.



“I'd solo on my guitar; then sing; then solo; then sing some more.
One stopped when the other started.
That way I felt a continuity, not a conflict, like a wheel that keeps turning. Both sounds - guitar and voice - were coming out of me, but they issued from different parts of my soul.” - B.B. King.

[The Rebel]

Bo Diddley.



Bo knows guitar!
“…Let’s take Bo Diddley’s “Crackin’ Up” included on The Big Bad Blues album. That upside-down and backwards guitar intro seems simple — until attempting to reproduce it… and then it becomes an analytical challenge to delve into what Bo might have had in mind. Delivering that figure was the definitive science experiment.”

“Bo didn’t leave a how-to manual. I’m guessing it came quite naturally to him as you would expect of a genius. Same goes for Lightin’ Hopkins. He wasn’t specifically playing predictable scales which, in a way, tells you that he invented something solely original. He (and Bo) were free from the constraints of any accepted norm, yet everything they did was accepted! They invented what they did out of thin air. That’s a reflection that they reserved an open mind and a vivid imagination. There’s not necessarily any particular “right way”… Sometimes a so-called “wrong way” is so, so right.” - Billy Gibbons.

[The Rebel]

Buddy Guy, Stevie Ray Vaughan.



Two amazing bluesmen who play Fender Stratocaster guitars…

[The Rebel]

Big Bill Broonzy.



“Some people call these folk songs. All the songs I’ve heard in my life was folk songs. I never heard horses sing one of ‘em yet.”
- Big Bill Broozny, 1953 “Amsterdam Live” concert recording.

[The Rebel]

Albert King.



“If it’s my show, it’s my stage… and I won’t let anyone mess with me. Believe me.” - Albert King.

[The Rebel]

Gary Moore.



“Used to be so easy to give my heart away
But I found out the hard way
There's a price you have to pay
I found out that love was no friend of mine
I should have known time after time.”

“So long, it was so long ago
But I've still got the blues for you…”
- Gary Moore, Still Got The Blues.

[The Rebel]

Elmore James.

SpoilerShow

“I think the thing that really “hooked” me about Elmore, though, is that – sure – there are great blues musicians. Many in fact. But there is something kind of special and a little different about Elmore. People still talk about his music with a reverence that you don’t often find with other blues artists. It’s really undeniable. I don’t know if I really adequately addressed that in the book, but I did put a lot of quotes in from other people that I think sort of addressed that issue. Another way of saying it might be this way — that Elmore James was what people refer to as a “musician’s musician.” It’s also interesting to me that when I had a chance to talk to Cosimo Matassa (some who had recorded him twice, down in New Orleans), that he pretty much told me, without any real prompting, that Elmore was one of the more memorable musicians that came through his door. That there was something about him that stood out from the regular crowd. And this coming from a guy who held hundreds and hundreds of sessions over the years!” - Steve Franz (Author of The Amazing Secret History of Elmore James).

[The Rebel]

Skip James.
June 9, 1902 – October 3, 1969.



“Skip at Newport ’64 was just transcendent. It was incredible. He sat down and he set his fingers down on the fretboard, and he took a breath and hit the first note of ‘Devil Got My Woman,’ and it was just incredible. Just shivers even at the memory of it.” - Dick Waterman.

[The Rebel]

Sonny Boy Williamson I.
March 30, 1914 – June 1, 1948.



“John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson was one of the most influential figures in blues history, a master harmonica player who not only brought the instrument onto equal footing with guitar and piano as a solo voice, but a singer, songwriter, and frontman who established a prototype for harmonica-led bands that’s been followed ever since, albeit with modernizing enhancements along the way.” - Tom Reney (New England Public Media)

“He is often regarded as the pioneer of the blues harp as a solo instrument. He played on hundreds of recordings by many pre–World War II blues artists. Under his own name, he was one of the most recorded blues musicians of the 1930s and 1940s.”

[The Rebel]

R. L. Burnside.



"I feel like people like Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside to me are every bit as important as Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf.”
"And we were living while they were making records and I could go and see them. And it was just, I don't know, I just felt a connection to it."- Dan Auerbach.

[Saturn]

[Saturn]