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.