Blues-Rock Essentials

Let be honest here, shall we? Blues-rock fretburners like Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, and Stevie Ray Vaughan typically receive all the love while other talented guitarists are too often forced to wait in line to gather up whatever crumbs of critical a…

The Woodstock Music & Art Fair was held from Friday, August 15th through Monday, August 18th, 1969 in Bethel, New York (not actually in Woodstock, as is commonly believed). The festival featured performances from 32 bands and artists, spawning two best-selling soundtrack albums and a documentary film. What is often overlooked, however, is that fully one-quarter of the artists performing at Woodst…

Blues-rock is a legitimate child of the hallowed blues music tradition, and it could be argued that the first wave of British bloozers like Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, John May…

Little did the bluesmen of the 1940s and '50s realize that the records they were making would be heard as far as half way across the world, inspiring a generation of teenage musicians in England, and across Europe as well as the U.S. Beginning in the early 1960s, music from artists like Muddy Waters , Big Bill Broonzy , Sonny Boy Williamson...

While the blues-rock trailblazers of the 1960s received their inspiration from the blues giants of the 1940s and '50s like Muddy Waters , Howlin' Wolf , and Sonny Boy Williamson , the blues-rock artists of the 1970s would in turn be influenced by bands like John Mayall's Bluesbreakers , Cream , Jimi Hendrix , and others. As it smoothed...