Portrait : Willie Kent (1936-2006)

A giant's journey

Willie Kent was a burly man, a stainless bassist, a real blues singer and a talented songwriter, but never an icon of the Chicago blues though he did play with almost all the Windy City renowned bluesmen. Among the best talented sidemen that contributed to make Chicago blues a legend, he deserves to be put up back where he belongs : on the front line.
Familiar to the blues aficionados but much less to the average community of blues listeners, Kent has a special asset though : he recorded a dozen albums under his name, most of them with his long time band The Gents.

Love at first note : Linwood Taylor

Blues on the rock

There's a bluesman that I want to tell you about though he's not really well-known outside the blues specialists circles.  “He has a white blues sound”, “he plays like a white”… are the first thoughts that will come up your mind. Not contemptuous thoughts, blues has only one color : blue. But the fact is that when you hear him on guitar, you think more to Jimmy Thackery than to B.B. King. Only when he starts to sing you realize this guy is an Afro-American. Not from Mississippi, not from Louisiana, not either from Chicago or Texas, but from the D.C. area. His name ? I'm tempted to let you guess… Just joking ! The man is Linwood Taylor.

Portrait : John “Juke” Logan (1946-2013)

Rockin' the blues

Three albums and a live with Doug MacLeod, that's about it, but enough to get a hell of a foot-stomping time. Three albums that rock, swing, boogie by a jack of all blues trades who unravels and revamps the blues with a rockin' heart, injecting different styles he feels like. But make it clear, it's not blues-rock.
This brilliant chameleon from South California (1) who was a real and respected blues connoisseur could put a J.J. Cale touch here, a Zydeco or New Orleans carnival beat there, a Latin feel a la Los Lobos (he was a good friend of David Hidalgo) or a bit of soul, always with a sharp sense of tasty exciting arrangements and generally a good dose of humor in his songwriting.

Portrait : Johnny B. Moore

 

From Clarksdale to Chicago

Johnny Belle Moore is an authentic son of the Delta : he was born in 1950 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, one of the iconic birthplaces of the blues. He first learned how to play guitar at age seven from his Baptist minister father Floyd Moore, and quite naturally played and sang gospel in his dad's church. In 1964, like so many elder blues musicians, he moved up to Chicago with his family after his mother died.
In the Windy City, Letha Jones, the widow of pianist Little Johnny Jones, took him under her wings and introduced him to the blues, playing lots of records to him. The young man was caught by the blues fever and got further guidance from Jimmy Reed that he had already met back in Clarksdale during his childhood.

Portrait : Blues Boy Willie

The man from Memphis… Texas

There's a town in Texas about 130 km south east of Amarillo, in the middle of endless cotton fields, named... Memphis. It's in this “Texas Delta” that one William Daniel McFalls better known as Blues Boy Willie was born in 1946. His father was then a tent show musician known as West Texas Slim that once accompanied Ma Rainey. He was blowing the harmonica and the young Willie wanted to do the same. When his father was out at work he used to sneak in and snatch one of his dad's harps to practice. Later, his father left the “devil's music” to become a preacher, and the young Willie would sing gospel in his dad's church.

Portrait : Sven Zetterberg (1952-2016)

→ Special thanks to L.C. for introducing me to this exciting bluesman from Sweden

Soul of the blues

It took him just a short year to master guitar perfectly when he was already 24. So perfectly that he was able to back the great Muddy Waters at a 1976 show in Stockholm. Since then he could compete with the best US blues guitarists. But his discovery of the blues goes back way before that when by the age of 12 he used to listen to blues on his small radio. After hearing Walter Horton, he started playing harmonica, and later started to sing, soon becoming a skilled blues singer.
His first band, Telge Blues, active from 1972 to 1976, released a unique album in 1975. He was singing and playing harmonica. It is when the band split that he decided to practice guitar intensively.

Portrait : Big George Jackson (1949-2021)

 Nothing Like the Rest (1994), Beggin' Ain't For Me (1998), Big Shot (2001), Southern In My Soul (2003)

Nothing but the groove

George Albert Jackson, dubbed “Big George” when he reached 6,5 feet, certainly was the best kept secret of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St Paul) where he was born in 1949. The release of his first opus Nothing Like the Rest in 1994 on the small local label Cold Wind Records rightly caught the attention of the Dutch label Black and Tan that published his next three albums (Beggin’ Ain’t For Me in 1998, Big Shot in 2001, and Southern In My Soul in 2003) and opened him the doors of concert halls and festivals on the Old Continent from 1999.