News & Updates — guitar

One of my favorite musicians was John Lee Hooker and his deeply entrancing boogie, a droning one-chord style that is one of the more direct links from American electric blues to an ancient African sound pool. From the Mississippi Delta, his exact birth year is disputed. His earliest musical experience was with spirituals before learning to play the blues from his step-father. He left home at 14 and by the '30s was playing on Memphis' Beale Street. In 1943, after a few years in Cincinnati, he started working at the Ford Motors plant in Detroit while playing local clubs. Around this...

Happy birthday to rock hero John Graham Mellor aka Joe Strummer!! Thanks for the great music with one of the greatest rock bands ever, The Clash, as well as your other projects.

I must give respect to that counter-cultural icon of The Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, on his day of birth. I was never a big fan of the Dead, although they certainly have their fine moments and I have a lot of respect for what they built and accomplished. But one of the best aspects of the band had always been Jerry's presence and his beautiful psychedelic guitar style. He could play also pedal steel and banjo, had a distinct singing voice, and his love for music allowed him to dip into many different styles, from folk-rock to garage punk, free...

July 29, 2016 would've been the 100th birthday of the innovative guitarist Charlie Christian. (A year ago...but I wrote this a year ago). He was one of the earliest guitar soloists in jazz (first in a long line of guitarists who wanted their instrument to sound like a sax) and an early pioneer of the electric guitar, a major contributor to the bebop revolution as well as a huge influence on Chuck Berry. He grew up in a musical family in Oklahoma City, and was a baseball star as a youth. He started out busking in the street before playing...

Happy birthday to one of my very favorite bluesmen, David "Junior" Kimbrough. He wasn't recorded too much in his early days, toiling for decades playing his "cottonpatch blues" at his roadside shack venue in Holly Springs, MS. He cut his first recordings in Memphis in '66 but they lay unreleased until long after Kimbrough's death. His first actual release (erroneously "Junior Kimbell") was his version of "Tramp", a 45 cut for the Philwood label in '67. In '69 he cut duets with rockabilly artist Charlie Feathers. He recorded scantly in the '70s and '80s but made his NYC debut at...