News & Updates — soul!

Happy birthday to the soulful blues guitarist and singer Little Milton, most famous for his hit version of "Grits Ain't Groceries" and his fine albums on Chess, Stax and Malaco. He is generally known to fit into the BB King/Albert King style of brassy, soulful blues with strings and such. It's a formula that found Milton some hits songs in the '60s & '70s. From the Mississippi Delta, his father Big Milton was a blues musician and Little Milton got into country music and jump blues, with T-Bone Walker a particularly big influence. He started his career with the Rhythm...

The wildly popular and immediately recognizable blues stylist Jimmy Reed was a major influence on rock music. His style was so simple and basic that it didn't matter what the critics said of his music, it was heard far & wide as he cranked out pop hit after pop hit in his formula. His laid-back, almost slurry style was a huge inspiration to members of the '60s rock generation (Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, Van Morrison, Yardbirds, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix) as well as blues artists like Slim Harpo. Some consider him a precursor to punk rock. Born on a plantation...

Happy birthday to that great hard bop pianist Horace Silver! He was of Cape Verdean heritage but grew up in Connecticut. He studied classical music as well as taking in the music of Cabo Verde that his father taught him. As a teenager he gigged on both piano and tenor sax. After playing with Stan Getz in Hartford in '50 he went on tour with him. He moved to NYC in '51 and started playing with Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins and Lou Donaldson. In '52 he began working for Blue Note Records, as a session pianist and as a recording...

Happy birthday to another one they sometimes call The Fifth Beatle, Billy Preston. The future top session man grew up in Los Angeles a piano prodigy. At 10 he was performing with Mahalia Jackson and was on TV at 11 dueting with Nat King Cole. He played a young WC Handy in the biopic St Louis Blues in '58. He joined Little Richard's group in '62 as the band organist, meeting the Beatles in Germany. In '63 he played on Sam Cooke's absolute classic Night Beat. The same year Cooke produced Preston's first album, 16 Year Old Soul. He joined Ray...

Born on this day in 1938, the soulful Alton Ellis was one of the finest rocksteady singers Jamaica ever produced. With a career going back to the late '50s, he recorded early on doing ska, R&B and ballads in the duo Alton & Eddy (and with his sister Hortense) for Studio 1 and Randy's. He teamed with John Holt for awhile and started The Flames, recording for Treasure Isle & again Studio 1. The genre took its name from Ellis' 1967 recording "Rock Steady", helping establish the genre and making Ellis popular enough to tour England. Several more hits followed...