News & Updates — Celebrate Icons

Perhaps the first country blues star and indisputably the father of Texas style blues, the unique guitar stylist and impressive singer Lemon Henry Jefferson (aka "Blind Lemon Jefferson") was born without sight to a sharecropping family from Texas. He began playing guitar at 19 and soon after he befriended and played a bunch with Lead Belly in Dallas. In 1917 he hired young T-Bone Walker as a guide and it was Jefferson who was his guitar teacher. (He also taught Josh White). He made his first recordings in '25, gospel sides released as by "Deacon L.J. Bates". In '26 he first...

One of my very favorite wordsmiths, Leonard Cohen delivered some lyrics of the deepest and most imaginative variety, a man who could articulate any emotion in the heaviest and clearest poetic sense. No topic was off limits and no emotion was irrelevant. A Montreal native, Leonard began his career strictly as a poet (first published in '54) and novelist before delivering his debut album Songs of Leonard Cohen in '67. The album shook the expectations of lyricists with its uninhibited display of pain, joy, sexuality, sadness and mysticism. Every serious singer/songwriter had to up their game after this monumental set...

One of the most-called session men of his day, the Comanche/Kiowa tribal guitarist/pianist Jesse Ed Davis was born on this day in 1944. His father Jesse was a well-known "True Indian" painter. The younger Davis got his musical career started in his native Oklahoma in a band in the late '50s with future Blood Sweat & Tears vocalist Jerry Fisher. In the mid-'60s he went on the road as a member of Conway Twitty's band before settling in California. Through friends Leon Russell and Levon Helm he got acquainted with the studio scene and started working as a session man/secret...

Happy birthday to Billy Bang, avant-jazz violinist of the NYC downtown loft jazz scene of the '70s & '80s and beyond. A unique presence, his style merges contemporary "classical"/avant-garde, fire music/free-jazz, blues, swing and funk and he always chose great sideman. He could work well as a solo performer, in duos, jazz combos, as part of an orchestra or with dancers (he himself was a great dancer onstage). Born William Walker in Alabama, he grew up in the Bronx & Harlem. He was given a violin because he was small. He learned to play it as a youth but quit...

One of the New Orleans iconic producers, Edwin Bocage aka Eddie Bo brought a harder, grittier sound to the Crescent City in the '60s & '70s funk world. With his awesome drummer James Black and a stable of ripping vocalists, he cut several classics and remains a local legend. Himself a soulful singer and pianist, he composed, arranged and produced some great R&B, blues and funk over a long career in which he became one of the city's most prolific artists. His family were builders and masons, as well as early NOLA jazz musicians. Bo's influences also include bebop and...