lesson:
The Impact of the Electric Guitar
How did the electrification, amplification and design of the guitar facilitate its emergence as a dominant instrument of popular music?
lesson:
Muddy Waters, the New Kid in Town
How did Muddy Waters’ music change after he moved to Chicago, and what does that say about the relationship between place and self-expression?
article:
Hank Williams
He couldn't read. He couldn't write. He couldn't stop screwing up. Yet Hank Williams is a giant of popular music without whom rock'n'roll might never have happened. "I thought about Hank when I walked out on that Opry stage for the first time. all I could think of was, This is the same stage that Hank Williams was on and now I'm here." – Elvis Presley IN JAILHOUSE ROCK, VINCE EVERETT, PLAYED BY Elvis Presley, has a photograph on his cell wall. Unsurprisingly, it's of Hank Williams. Both singers were influenced by black music early in life, both won talent shows and learnt...
people:
B.B. King
(1925 – 2015) The combination of B.B. King’s gut wrenching vocals and his distinctive guitar style — marked by stinging vibrato, deft phrasing and fluid string bending — has made him one on the most recognizable, successful and influential Blues performers of all time. King was born Riley B. King on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta, where his father abandoned the family when King was 4. Raised mostly by his grandmother, he worked the cotton fields and sang gospel by day, and played blues guitar on street corners for dimes by night. In 1947, King hitchhiked north to the thriving music scene of...
article:
Punk Rock: Its Day Will Come
IF YOU thought Jefferson Airplane was a weird name, let some of these drop off your tongue. Talking Heads. Tuff Darts. Ramones. Planets. Heartbreakers. Shirts. Television. Day Old Bread. Manster. They are names of some of the better known of hundreds of New York area bands, often categorized under the catch-all "punk rock" or "punk bands," that are attracting rock fans to lower Manhattan clubs like CBGB, Mothers and Max's Kansas City. That definition is misleading, because the punkiest thing about most of the bands is their names. They represent a variety of musical styles and competence levels. Some, like Television...
article:
James Brown: Mister Messiah
JAMES BROWN will die on the stage one night, on the moving staircase of his own feet in front of a thirty-piece band; and then who knows what may be unloosed between black Americans and white? In Baltimore or Washington or Detroit, cities where the very peace between them has a quality of angry breathing, merely the presence of Brown has been reckoned to equal 100 policemen. Harlem, on the sweltering night after an atrocity, he can cool by one word. At the end of each performance he sings the chorus "Soul Power" over and over again with bass guitar...
people:
Neil Young
(b. 1945) In a career spanning five decades, Neil Young has earned wide admiration as an iconoclast who’s taken full advantage of Rock’s capacity for endless reinvention. His idiosyncratic career path has found him alternating superstar smashes with staunchly uncommercial and/or highly personal projects — a pattern that he set early in his career and has maintained in the decades since. The Canadian-born singer, songwriter, and guitarist achieved his first major recognition in 1966 as a member of the Los Angeles-based Country Rock band Buffalo Springfield, which established Young as a distinctive, prodigious talent. He had already launched a solo career when...