1.
Tunica, Mississippi
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Tunica is a town in and the county seat of Tunica County, Mississippi, near the Mississippi River. Until the early 1990s, the town was one of the most impoverished places in the United States. Tunica is the community to serve as county seat of Tunica County, succeeding earlier county seats at Commerce, Peyton. Tunica gained national attention for its deprived neighborhood known as Sugar Ditch Alley and its fortunes have improved since development of a gambling resort area nearby. While population growth has occurred mostly outside Tunica, the major casinos employ numerous locals and they attract visitors from nearby Memphis, Tennessee, West Memphis, Arkansas and all over the Southeastern United States. Tunica is located approximately 20 miles south of Downtown Memphis, Tennessee, according to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 0.7 square miles, all land. As of the census of 2000, there were 1,132 people,537 households, the population density was 1,588.4 people per square mile. There were 592 housing units at a density of 830.7 per square mile. The racial makeup of the town was 67. 84% White,29. 42% African American,0. 27% Native American,1. 06% Asian,0. 88% from other races, hispanic or Latino of any race were 2. 30% of the population. Of all households,48. 0% were made up of individuals and 26. 4% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older, the average household size was 2.01 and the average family size was 2.94. In the town, the population was out with 18. 9% under the age of 18,6. 1% from 18 to 24,23. 4% from 25 to 44,28. 3% from 45 to 64. The median age was 46 years, for every 100 females there were 87.7 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 80.0 males, the median income for a household in the town was $26,607, and the median income for a family was $54,583. Males had an income of $30,208 versus $22,250 for females. The per capita income for the town was $20,114, about 17. 1% of families and 25. 5% of the population were below the poverty line, including 33. 3% of those under age 18 and 21. 3% of those age 65 or over. Casino gamblings effect on the economy has spurred population growth in unincorporated parts of the county outside Tunica proper. Since 1990, the name has been popularly associated with several casinos located near the Mississippi River. However, the current group of casinos is located from the community of Tunica Resorts,10 miles north of the town of Tunica, and extending to the DeSoto County line
2.
Mississippi
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Mississippi /ˌmɪsᵻˈsɪpi/ is a state in the southern region of the United States, with part of its southern border formed by the Gulf of Mexico. Its western border is formed by the Mississippi River, the state has a population of approximately 3 million. It is the 32nd most extensive and the 32nd most populous of the 50 United States, located in the center of the state, Jackson is the state capital and largest city, with a population of approximately 175,000 people. The state is heavily forested outside of the Mississippi Delta area, before the American Civil War, most development in the state was along riverfronts, where slaves worked on cotton plantations. After the war, the bottomlands to the interior were cleared, by the end of the 19th century, African Americans made up two-thirds of the Deltas property owners, but timber and railroad companies acquired much of the land after a financial crisis. Clearing altered the Deltas ecology, increasing the severity of flooding along the Mississippi, much land is now held by agribusinesses. The states catfish aquaculture farms produce the majority of farm-raised catfish consumed in the United States, since the 1930s and the Great Migration, Mississippi has been majority white, albeit with the highest percentage of black residents of any U. S. state. From the early 19th century to the 1930s, its residents were mostly black, whites retained political power through Jim Crow laws. In 2010, 37% of Mississippians were African Americans, the highest percentage of African Americans in any U. S. state, since gaining enforcement of their voting franchise in the late 1960s, most African Americans support Democratic candidates in local, state and national elections. Conservative whites have shifted to the Republican Party, African Americans are a majority in many counties of the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, an area of historic settlement during the plantation era. Since 2011 Mississippi has been ranked as the most religious state in the country, the states name is derived from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary. Settlers named it after the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi, in addition to its namesake, major rivers in Mississippi include the Big Black River, the Pearl River, the Yazoo River, the Pascagoula River, and the Tombigbee River. Major lakes include Ross Barnett Reservoir, Arkabutla Lake, Sardis Lake, Mississippi is entirely composed of lowlands, the highest point being Woodall Mountain, in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains,807 feet above sea level. The lowest point is sea level at the Gulf coast, the states mean elevation is 300 feet above sea level. Most of Mississippi is part of the East Gulf Coastal Plain, the coastal plain is generally composed of low hills, such as the Pine Hills in the south and the North Central Hills. The Pontotoc Ridge and the Fall Line Hills in the northeast have somewhat higher elevations, yellow-brown loess soil is found in the western parts of the state. The northeast is a region of black earth that extends into the Alabama Black Belt. The coastline includes large bays at Bay St. Louis, Biloxi, the northwest remainder of the state consists of the Mississippi Delta, a section of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain
3.
United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
4.
Austin, Texas
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Austin is the capital of the U. S. state of Texas and the seat of Travis County. It is the 11th-most populous city in the U. S. and it is the fastest growing large city in the United States and the second most populous capital city after Phoenix, Arizona. As of the U. S. Census Bureaus July 1,2015 estimate and it is the cultural and economic center of the Austin–Round Rock metropolitan area, which had an estimated population of 2,056,405 as of July 1,2016. In the 1830s, pioneers began to settle the area in central Austin along the Colorado River, in 1839, the site was officially chosen to replace Houston as the new capital of the Republic of Texas and was incorporated under the name Waterloo. Shortly thereafter, the name was changed to Austin in honor of Stephen F. Austin, the Father of Texas and the republics first secretary of state. The city subsequently grew throughout the 19th century and became a center for government and education with the construction of the Texas State Capitol and the University of Texas at Austin. After a lull in growth from the Great Depression, Austin resumed its development into a city and, by the 1980s, it emerged as a center for technology. A number of Fortune 500 companies have headquarters or regional offices in Austin, including Amazon. com, cisco, eBay, Google, IBM, Intel, Oracle Corporation, Texas Instruments, 3M, and Whole Foods Market. Dells worldwide headquarters is located in nearby Round Rock, a suburb of Austin, residents of Austin are known as Austinites. They include a mix of government employees, college students, musicians, high-tech workers, blue-collar workers. The city also adopted Silicon Hills as a nickname in the 1990s due to an influx of technology. In the late 1800s, Austin was known as the City of the Violet Crown because of the glow of light across the hills just after sunset. Even today, many Austin businesses use the term Violet Crown in their name, Austin is known as a clean-air city for its stringent no-smoking ordinances that apply to all public places and buildings, including restaurants and bars. The FBI ranked Austin as the second-safest major city in the U. S. for the year 2012, U. S. News & World Report named Austin the best place to live in the U. S. in 2017. Austin, Travis County and Williamson County have been the site of habitation since at least 9200 BC. When settlers arrived from Europe, the Tonkawa tribe inhabited the area, the Comanches and Lipan Apaches were also known to travel through the area. Spanish colonists, including the Espinosa-Olivares-Aguirre expedition, traveled through the area for centuries, in 1730, three missions from East Texas were combined and reestablished as one mission on the south side of the Colorado River, in what is now Zilker Park, in Austin. The mission was in area for only about seven months
5.
Texas
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Texas is the second largest state in the United States by both area and population. Other major cities include Austin, the second most populous state capital in the U. S. Texas is nicknamed the Lone Star State to signify its former status as an independent republic, and as a reminder of the states struggle for independence from Mexico. The Lone Star can be found on the Texan state flag, the origin of Texass name is from the word Tejas, which means friends in the Caddo language. Due to its size and geologic features such as the Balcones Fault, although Texas is popularly associated with the U. S. southwestern deserts, less than 10 percent of Texas land area is desert. Most of the centers are located in areas of former prairies, grasslands, forests. Traveling from east to west, one can observe terrain that ranges from coastal swamps and piney woods, to rolling plains and rugged hills, the term six flags over Texas refers to several nations that have ruled over the territory. Spain was the first European country to claim the area of Texas, Mexico controlled the territory until 1836 when Texas won its independence, becoming an independent Republic. In 1845, Texas joined the United States as the 28th state, the states annexation set off a chain of events that caused the Mexican–American War in 1846. A slave state before the American Civil War, Texas declared its secession from the U. S. in early 1861, after the Civil War and the restoration of its representation in the federal government, Texas entered a long period of economic stagnation. One Texan industry that thrived after the Civil War was cattle, due to its long history as a center of the industry, Texas is associated with the image of the cowboy. The states economic fortunes changed in the early 20th century, when oil discoveries initiated a boom in the state. With strong investments in universities, Texas developed a diversified economy, as of 2010 it shares the top of the list of the most Fortune 500 companies with California at 57. With a growing base of industry, the leads in many industries, including agriculture, petrochemicals, energy, computers and electronics, aerospace. Texas has led the nation in export revenue since 2002 and has the second-highest gross state product. The name Texas, based on the Caddo word tejas meaning friends or allies, was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves, during Spanish colonial rule, the area was officially known as the Nuevo Reino de Filipinas, La Provincia de Texas. Texas is the second largest U. S. state, behind Alaska, though 10 percent larger than France and almost twice as large as Germany or Japan, it ranks only 27th worldwide amongst country subdivisions by size. If it were an independent country, Texas would be the 40th largest behind Chile, Texas is in the south central part of the United States of America. Three of its borders are defined by rivers, the Rio Grande forms a natural border with the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas to the south
6.
Blues
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Blues is a genre and musical form originated by African Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the end of the 19th century. The genre developed from roots in African musical traditions, African-American work songs, spirituals, Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. Blue notes, usually thirds or fifths flattened in pitch, are also a part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove, Blues as a genre is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times, Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating the troubles experienced in African-American society. Many elements, such as the format and the use of blue notes. The origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community. The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after the ending of slavery and, later and it is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century, the first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres include country blues, such as Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues, World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a form called blues rock evolved. The term blues may have come from blue devils, meaning melancholy and sadness, the phrase blue devils may also have been derived from Britain in the 1600s, when the term referred to the intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal. As time went on, the phrase lost the reference to devils, by the 1800s in the United States, the term blues was associated with drinking alcohol, a meaning which survives in the phrase blue law, which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sunday. Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to in print since 1912, in lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood. The lyrics of traditional blues verses probably often consisted of a single line repeated four times. Two of the first published songs, Dallas Blues and Saint Louis Blues, were 12-bar blues with the AAB lyric structure. Handy wrote that he adopted this convention to avoid the monotony of lines repeated three times, the lines are often sung following a pattern closer to rhythmic talk than to a melody
7.
Chicago blues
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The Chicago blues is a form of blues music indigenous to Chicago, Illinois. Chicago blues is a type of urban blues, Muddy Waters directly joined that migration, like many others, such as in Florida, avoiding the more harshly southern Jim Crow laws. Bruce Iglauer, founder of Alligator Records stated that, Chicago blues is the music of the industrial city and you cant keep talking about mules, workin on the levee. Chicago blues was influenced by Mississippi bluesman who traveled to Chicago in the early 1940s. The development of blues, up to Chicago blues, is arguably as follows, Country blues, to city blues, Chicago blues is based around the sound of the electric guitar and the harmonica, with the harmonica played through a PA system or guitar amplifier. Urban blues started in Chicago and St. Louis, as created by part-time musicians playing as street musicians, at rent parties. For example, bottleneck guitarist Kokomo Arnold was a steelworker and had a business that was far more profitable than his music. One of the most important early incubators for Chicago blues was the market on Maxwell Street. Residents of the community would frequent it to buy and sell just about anything. It was a location for blues musicians to perform, earn tips. The standard path for blues musicians was to start out as musicians and at house parties. The first blues clubs in Chicago were mostly in black neighborhoods on the South Side. New trends in technology, chaotic streets and bars adding drums to an electric mix, one of the most famous was Ruby Lee Gatewoods Tavern, known by patrons as The Gates. During the 1930s virtually every big-name artist played there, what drove the blues to international influence was the promotion of record companies such as Paramount Records, RCA Victor, and Columbia Records. Through such record companies Chicago blues became a commercial enterprise, the new style of music eventually reached Europe and the United Kingdom. In the 1960s, young British musicians were influenced by Chicago blues resulting in the British blues movement. Bo Diddley, Mike Bloomfield, Mike Wheeler, Homesick James, Johnny Shines, Johnny Young, Floyd Jones, Eddy Clearwater, Mighty Joe Young, Phil Guy, Lil Ed Williams, J. B. Many blues artists recorded for Bluebird, if briefly, while Arthur Crudup, Lil Green
8.
Delta blues
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The Delta blues style of blues music is one of the earliest. The Mississippi Delta is famous for its fertile soil and for its poverty, Delta blues is regarded as a regional variant of country blues. Guitar and harmonica are its dominant instruments, slide guitar is a hallmark of the style, vocal styles in Delta blues range from introspective and soulful to passionate and fiery. The major labels produced the earliest recordings, consisting mostly of one person singing and playing an instrument, live performances, however, more commonly involved a group of musicians. Current belief is that Freddie Spruell is the first Delta blues artist to have been recorded, record company talent scouts made some of the early recordings on field trips to the South, and some performers were invited to travel to northern cities to record. According to Dixon and Godrich, Tommy Johnson and Ishmon Bracey were recorded by Victor on that companys second field trip to Memphis, in 1928. Robert Wilkins was first recorded by Victor in Memphis in 1928, son House first recorded in Grafton, Wisconsin, in 1930 for Paramount Records. Charley Patton also recorded for Paramount in Grafton, in June 1929 and he also traveled to New York City for recording sessions in January and February 1934. Robert Johnson recorded his only sessions, for ARC, in San Antonio in 1936 and their recordings, numbering in the thousands, now reside in the Smithsonian Institution. However, this claim has been disputed, as John and Alan Lomax had recorded Bukka White in 1939, Lead Belly in 1933 and most likely others. Scholars disagree as to whether there is a substantial difference between blues that originated in the Mississippi Delta and blues from other parts of the country. Delta blues is a style as much as a form, Skip James and Elmore James. Performers traveled throughout the Mississippi Delta, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, eventually, Delta blues spread out across the country, giving rise to a host of regional variations, including Chicago blues and Detroit blues. Delta blues songs are typically expressed in the first person and often concern love, sex, in big-city blues, women singers such as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith dominated the recordings of the 1920s. However, women rarely recorded Delta blues and other rural or folk-style blues and it was not until late in the 1960s that women began to be heard in recorded performances at the level they had previously enjoyed. Other women influenced by Delta blues, who learned some of the most notable of the original artists still living, include Bonnie Raitt, Rory Block. Many Delta blues artists, such as Big Joe Williams, moved to Detroit and Chicago, traveling the Blues Highway, National Geographic Magazine, April 1999, vol. Dixon, R. M. W. and Godrich, J. Blues and Gospel Records, Ferris, William R. Blues from the Delta
9.
Electric blues
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Electric blues refers to any type of blues music distinguished by the use of electric amplification for musical instruments. The guitar was the first instrument to be amplified and used by early pioneers T-Bone Walker in the late 1930s and John Lee Hooker. Their styles developed into West Coast blues, Detroit blues, and post-World War II Chicago blues, by the early 1950s, Little Walter was a featured soloist on blues harmonica or blues harp using a small hand-held microphone fed into a guitar amplifier. Although it took a longer, the electric bass guitar gradually replaced the stand-up bass by the early 1960s. Electric organs and especially keyboards later became used in electric blues. The blues, like jazz, probably began to be amplified in the late 1930s. After World War II, amplified blues music popular in American cities that had seen widespread African American migration, such as Chicago, Memphis, Detroit, St. Louis. The initial impulse was to be heard above the noise of lively rent parties, playing in small venues, electric blues bands tended to remain modest in size compared with larger jazz bands. In its early electric blues typically used amplified electric guitars, double bass, and harmonica played through a microphone. By the late 1940s several Chicago-based blues artists had begun to use amplification, including John Lee Williamson, early recordings in the new style were made in 1947 and 1948 by musicians such as Johnny Young, Floyd Jones, and Snooky Pryor. The format was perfected by Muddy Waters, who utilized various small groups that provided a strong rhythm section and his I Cant Be Satisfied was followed by a series of ground-breaking recordings. Chicago blues is influenced to an extent by the Mississippi blues style. Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Jimmy Reed were all born in Mississippi and moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. In addition to guitar, harmonica, and a rhythm section of bass and drums. Lenoirs also used saxophones, largely as a supporting instrument, Muddy Waters and Elmore James were known for their innovative use of slide electric guitar. Howlin Wolf and Muddy Waters were for their deep, gravelly voices, bassist and composer Willie Dixon played a major role on the Chicago blues scene. He composed and wrote many standard blues songs of the period, such as Hoochie Coochie Man, I Just Want to Make Love to You and, Wang Dang Doodle, Spoonful and Back Door Man for Howlin Wolf. Most artists of the Chicago blues style recorded for the Chicago-based Chess Records and Checker Records labels, there were also smaller blues labels in this era including Vee-Jay Records and J. O. B
10.
Jazz
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Jazz is a music genre that originated amongst African Americans in New Orleans, United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in Blues and Ragtime. Since the 1920s jazz age, jazz has become recognized as a form of musical expression. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms, Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions including blues and ragtime, as well as European military band music. Although the foundation of jazz is deeply rooted within the Black experience of the United States, different cultures have contributed their own experience, intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as one of Americas original art forms. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on different national, regional, and local musical cultures, New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass-band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. In the 1930s, heavily arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz, bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging musicians music which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed in the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments. In the early 1980s, a form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful. Other styles and genres abound in the 2000s, such as Latin, the question of the origin of the word jazz has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well documented. It is believed to be related to jasm, a term dating back to 1860 meaning pep. The use of the word in a context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Its first documented use in a context in New Orleans was in a November 14,1916 Times-Picayune article about jas bands. In an interview with NPR, musician Eubie Blake offered his recollections of the slang connotations of the term, saying, When Broadway picked it up. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, the American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Twentieth Century. Jazz has proved to be difficult to define, since it encompasses such a wide range of music spanning a period of over 100 years. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions, in the opinion of Robert Christgau, most of us would say that inventing meaning while letting loose is the essence and promise of jazz. As Duke Ellington, one of jazzs most famous figures, said, although jazz is considered highly difficult to define, at least in part because it contains so many varied subgenres, improvisation is consistently regarded as being one of its key elements
11.
Memphis blues
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The Memphis blues is a style of blues music ocreated from the 1910s to the 1930s by musicians in the Memphis area, like Frank Stokes, Sleepy John Estes, Furry Lewis and Memphis Minnie. The style was popular in vaudeville and medicine shows and was associated with Beale Street, handy, the Father of the Blues, published the song The Memphis Blues. In lyrics, the phrase has been used to describe a depressed mood, in addition to guitar-based blues, jug bands, such as Gus Cannons Jug Stompers and the Memphis Jug Band, were extremely popular practitioners of Memphis blues. The jug band style emphasized the danceable, syncopated rhythms of early jazz and it was played on simple, sometimes homemade, instruments such as harmonicas, violins, mandolins, banjos, and guitars, backed by washboards, kazoo, guimbarde and jugs blown to supply the bass. Sun recorded Howlin Wolf, Willie Nix, Ike Turner, B. B. King, electric Memphis blues featured explosive, distorted electric guitar work, thunderous drumming, and fierce, declamatory vocals. Musicians associated with Sun Records included Joe Hill Louis, Willie Johnson and Pat Hare
12.
Rock music
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It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by blues, rhythm and blues and country music. Rock music also drew strongly on a number of genres such as electric blues and folk. Musically, rock has centered on the guitar, usually as part of a rock group with electric bass guitar. Typically, rock is song-based music usually with a 4/4 time signature using a verse-chorus form, like pop music, lyrics often stress romantic love but also address a wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political in emphasis. Punk was an influence into the 1980s on the subsequent development of subgenres, including new wave, post-punk. From the 1990s alternative rock began to rock music and break through into the mainstream in the form of grunge, Britpop. Similarly, 1970s punk culture spawned the visually distinctive goth and emo subcultures and this trio of instruments has often been complemented by the inclusion of other instruments, particularly keyboards such as the piano, Hammond organ and synthesizers. The basic rock instrumentation was adapted from the blues band instrumentation. A group of musicians performing rock music is termed a rock band or rock group, Rock music is traditionally built on a foundation of simple unsyncopated rhythms in a 4/4 meter, with a repetitive snare drum back beat on beats two and four. Melodies are often derived from older musical modes, including the Dorian and Mixolydian, harmonies range from the common triad to parallel fourths and fifths and dissonant harmonic progressions. Critics have stressed the eclecticism and stylistic diversity of rock, because of its complex history and tendency to borrow from other musical and cultural forms, it has been argued that it is impossible to bind rock music to a rigidly delineated musical definition. These themes were inherited from a variety of sources, including the Tin Pan Alley pop tradition, folk music and rhythm, as a result, it has been seen as articulating the concerns of this group in both style and lyrics. Christgau, writing in 1972, said in spite of some exceptions, rock and roll usually implies an identification of male sexuality, according to Simon Frith rock was something more than pop, something more than rock and roll. Rock musicians combined an emphasis on skill and technique with the concept of art as artistic expression, original. The foundations of music are in rock and roll, which originated in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Its immediate origins lay in a melding of various musical genres of the time, including rhythm and blues and gospel music, with country. In 1951, Cleveland, Ohio disc jockey Alan Freed began playing rhythm and blues music for a multi-racial audience, debate surrounds which record should be considered the first rock and roll record. Other artists with rock and roll hits included Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis
13.
Singing
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Singing is the act of producing musical sounds with the voice, and augments regular speech by the use of sustained tonality, rhythm, and a variety of vocal techniques. A person who sings is called a singer or vocalist, Singers perform music that can be sung with or without accompaniment by musical instruments. Singing is often done in an ensemble of musicians, such as a choir of singers or a band of instrumentalists, Singers may perform as soloists, or accompanied by anything from a single instrument up to a symphony orchestra or big band. Singing can be formal or informal, arranged or improvised and it may be done as a form of religious devotion, as a hobby, as a source of pleasure, comfort, or ritual, as part of music education, or as a profession. Excellence in singing requires time, dedication, instruction, and regular practice, if practice is done on a regular basis then the sounds can become more clear and strong. Professional singers usually build their careers around one specific genre, such as classical or rock. They typically take voice training provided by teachers or vocal coaches throughout their careers. Though these four mechanisms function independently, they are coordinated in the establishment of a vocal technique and are made to interact upon one another. During passive breathing, air is inhaled with the diaphragm while exhalation occurs without any effort, exhalation may be aided by the abdominal, internal intercostal and lower pelvis/pelvic muscles. Inhalation is aided by use of external intercostals, scalenes and sternocleidomastoid muscles, the pitch is altered with the vocal cords. With the lips closed, this is called humming, humans have vocal folds which can loosen, tighten, or change their thickness, and over which breath can be transferred at varying pressures. The shape of the chest and neck, the position of the tongue, any one of these actions results in a change in pitch, volume, timbre, or tone of the sound produced. Sound also resonates within different parts of the body and an individuals size, Singers can also learn to project sound in certain ways so that it resonates better within their vocal tract. This is known as vocal resonation, another major influence on vocal sound and production is the function of the larynx which people can manipulate in different ways to produce different sounds. These different kinds of function are described as different kinds of vocal registers. The primary method for singers to accomplish this is through the use of the Singers Formant and it has also been shown that a more powerful voice may be achieved with a fatter and fluid-like vocal fold mucosa. The more pliable the mucosa, the more efficient the transfer of energy from the airflow to the vocal folds, Vocal registration refers to the system of vocal registers within the voice. A register in the voice is a series of tones, produced in the same vibratory pattern of the vocal folds
14.
Harmonica
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There are many types of harmonica, including diatonic, chromatic, tremolo, octave, orchestral, and bass versions. A harmonica is played by using the mouth to direct air into or out of one or more holes along a mouthpiece, behind each hole is a chamber containing at least one reed. A harmonica reed is a flat elongated spring typically made of brass, stainless steel, or bronze, when the free end is made to vibrate by the players air, it alternately blocks and unblocks the airway to produce sound. Reeds are pre-tuned to individual pitches, tuning may involve changing a reeds length, the weight near its free end, or the stiffness near its fixed end. Longer, heavier and springier reeds produce deeper, lower sounds, an important technique in performance is bending, causing a drop in pitch by making embouchure adjustments. Such two-reed pitch changes actually involve sound production by the normally silent reed, the basic parts of the harmonica are the comb, reed plates and cover plates. The comb is the body of the instrument, which. The term comb may originate from the similarity between this part of a harmonica and a hair comb, Harmonica combs were traditionally made from wood but now are also made from plastic or metal. Some modern and experimental designs are complex in the way that they direct the air. There is dispute among players about whether comb material affects the tone of a harmonica, among those saying yes are those who are convinced by their ears. Few dispute, however, that comb surface smoothness and air-tightness when mated with the reedplates can greatly affect tone, the main advantage of a particular comb material over another one is its durability. In particular, a comb can absorb moisture from the players breath. This can cause the comb to expand slightly, making the instrument uncomfortable to play, various types of wood and treatments have been devised to reduce the degree of this problem. Much effort is devoted by serious players to restoring wood combs, some players used to soak wooden-combed harmonicas in water to cause a slight expansion, which they intended to make the seal between the comb, reed plates and covers more airtight. Modern wooden-combed harmonicas are less prone to swelling and contracting, players still dip harmonicas in water for the way it affects tone and ease of bending notes. The reed plate is a grouping of several reeds in a single housing, the reeds are usually made of brass, but steel, aluminium and plastic are occasionally used. Individual reeds are usually riveted to the plate, but they may also be welded or screwed in place. Reeds fixed on the side of the reed plate respond to blowing
15.
Drum kit
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A drum kit consists of a mix of drums and idiophones most significantly cymbals but also including the woodblock and cowbell. In the 2000s, some also include electronic instruments and both hybrid and entirely electronic kits are used. If some or all of them are replaced by electronic drums, the drum kit is usually played while seated on a drum stool or throne. The drum kit differs from instruments that can be used to produce pitched melodies or chords, even though drums are often placed musically alongside others that do, such as the piano or guitar. The drum kit is part of the rhythm section used in many types of popular and traditional music styles ranging from rock and pop to blues. Other standard instruments used in the section include the electric bass, electric guitar. Many drummers extend their kits from this pattern, adding more drums, more cymbals. Some performers, such as some rockabilly drummers, use small kits that omit elements from the basic setup, some drum kit players may have other roles in the band, such as providing backup vocals, or less commonly, lead vocals. Thus, in an early 1800s orchestra piece, if the called for bass drum, triangle and cymbals. In the 1840s, percussionists began to experiment with foot pedals as a way to them to play more than one instrument. In the 1860s, percussionists started combining multiple drums into a set, the bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, and other percussion instruments were all played using hand-held drum sticks. Double-drumming was developed to one person to play the bass and snare with sticks. With this approach, the drum was usually played on beats one. This resulted in a swing and dance feel. The drum set was referred to as a trap set. By the 1870s, drummers were using an overhang pedal, most drummers in the 1870s preferred to do double drumming without any pedal to play multiple drums, rather than use an overhang pedal. Companies patented their pedal systems such as Dee Dee Chandler of New Orleans 1904–05, liberating the hands for the first time, this evolution saw the bass drum played with the foot of a standing percussionist. The bass drum became the central piece around which every other percussion instrument would later revolve and it was the golden age of drum building for many famous drum companies, with Ludwig introducing
16.
Buddah Records
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Buddah Records was founded in 1967 in New York City. The label was out of Kama Sutra Records, an MGM Records-distributed label. Buddah handled a variety of genres, including bubblegum pop, folk-rock, experimental music. Kama Sutra Records helped bolster MGM Records profits during 1965 and 1966, Kass brought in 24-year-old Neil Bogart to oversee Buddahs daily operations. Bogart had been an MGM General Manager in the early 1960s before taking a VP/Sales Director position at Cameo-Parkway Records, Bogart would quickly enlist Cameo-Parkway producers Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz, the Ohio Express, and ex-Cameo artists the Five Stairsteps into the new label. Buddahs first single was Yes, We Have No Bananas/The Audition by the Mulberry Fruit Band, Kass and Bogart also brought along the promotion department of Cameo-Parkway, which was shutting down. Buddah initially made its mark as a pop music label, with Ohio Express. However, it was The Lemon Pipers who gave Buddah its first No.1 hit with Green Tambourine, produced by Paul Leka, as bubblegum musics popularity declined at the turn of the decade, Buddah branched out into gospel, folk-country, and R&B. Neil Bogart created and distributed Brut Records via Buddah Records for the Brut Fabergé company, Bogart left Buddah in 1973 to start Casablanca Records. Soon after Bogarts departure, Gladys Knight & the Pips would emerge as Buddahs biggest success, previously signed to Motown, Knight and the Pips would release their biggest hits, including Midnight Train to Georgia and Youre the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me, for Buddah. Jazz session drummer Norman Connors became Buddahs musical director in 1976 and helped to foster the labels move toward R&B, viewlex declared bankruptcy in 1976 and Art Kass purchased Buddah back from them, but the debt resulted in a substantial decline in the number of new releases. Arista Records took over distribution of Buddah from 1978 to 1983, with artists, including Norman Connors and Phyllis Hyman. Buddahs final release of new product came in mid-1983, with Michael Hendersons R&B hit Fickle, Kama Sutras final issue came a year later, with the Fat Boys s self-titled single. Buddah, now known as Buddha Records was re-activated by BMG in September 1998 as a reissue label, the Buddah/Buddha catalogue is now owned by Sony Music Entertainment and managed by Legacy Recordings. Buddah distributed many labels during its history, including the following, Buddah would adopt the font Charisma on their Mad Hatter label to create a uniform branding for its key labels in 1973, although Charismas distribution deal with Buddah would end later that year. Hot Wax Records, owned by Motown songwriting trio Holland-Dozier-Holland, 1969–1973, pavilion Records, a short-lived gospel music imprint best known for its release of Oh Happy Day by The Edwin Hawkins Singers in 1969. Studio One Records, the Jamaican label founded by Coxsone Dodd, Buddah released various selections from Studio Ones back catalog in 1978. 1967, Buddah Records in stylized black letters at the bottom, singles feature the head of a Buddha statue at the top of the label, albums show the entire statue at the bottom
17.
Telarc International Corporation
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Telarc International Corporation is an American audiophile, independent record label founded in 1977 by two classically trained musicians and former teachers, Jack Renner and Robert Woods. Though it started as a label, Telarc has released jazz, blues. In 1996, Telarc merged with independent label, Heads Up. In late 2005 both Telarc and Heads Up were bought by Concord Records, today both labels operate as semi-autonomous units in the Concord Music Group. Telarc is noted for the quality of its recordings, encapsulated in the slogan The Telarc Sound. Its audio engineers are highly regarded within the business and have led Telarc to 54 Grammy Awards on its own label. In 2004 it received the Label of the Year award from Gramophone magazine, Telarc was one of the first labels to record music with a 20-bit analog-to-digital converter in the late 1980s and has used 24-bit formats since 1996. Currently, the majority of Telarcs releases are Super Audio CDs based on Direct Stream Digital recordings, in February 2009, due to corporate restructuring at Concord Music Group, Telarc announced it would cut twenty-six jobs and that it would also stop producing its own recordings. These job cuts included the highly regarded, multi-award-winning production team, Telarcs founder and former president Robert Woods resigned in March 2009 and was replaced by Heads Up president Dave Love. Love was subsequently let go the following month, in 2013, the Blues Foundation honored Telarc with its 2013 Keeping the Blues Alive Award. Every year the Blues Foundation presents the KBA Awards to individuals, the KBA ceremony was held in conjunction with the 29th International Blues Challenge. The KBAs are awarded on the basis of merit by a panel of blues professionals to those working to actively promote
18.
Muddy Waters
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McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, was an American blues musician who is often cited as the father of modern Chicago blues. Muddy Waters grew up on Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi, and by age 17 was playing the guitar and he was recorded in Mississippi by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1941. In 1943, he moved to Chicago to become a full-time, in 1946, he recorded his first records for Columbia Records and then for Aristocrat Records, a newly formed label run by the brothers Leonard and Phil Chess. These songs included Hoochie Coochie Man, I Just Want to Make Love to You, in 1958, he traveled to England, laying the foundations of the subsequent blues boom there. His performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960 was recorded and released as his first live album, Muddy Waters influence was tremendous, not just on blues and rhythm and blues but on rock and roll, hard rock, folk music, jazz, and country music. His use of amplification is often cited as the link between Delta blues and rock and roll, Muddy Waters birthplace and date is not conclusively known. He stated that he was born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi in 1915, a 1955 interview in the Chicago Defender is the earliest he claimed 1915 as his year of birth, which he continued to use in interviews from that point onward. The 1920 census lists him as five years old as of March 6,1920, the Social Security Death Index, relying on the Social Security card application submitted after his move to Chicago in the mid-1940s, lists him as being born April 4,1913. His gravestone gives his year as 1915. Muddy Waters grandmother, Della Grant, raised him after his mother died shortly after his birth, Grant gave him the nickname Muddy at an early age because he loved to play in the muddy water of nearby Deer Creek. Waters was added later, as he began to play harmonica. The remains of the cabin on Stovall Plantation where Waters lived in his youth are now at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale and he had his first introduction to music in church, I used to belong to church. I was a good Baptist, singing in the church, so I got all of my good moaning and trembling going on for me right out of church, he recalled. By the time, he was 17, he had purchased his first guitar, I sold the last horse that we had. Made about fifteen dollars for him, gave my grandmother seven dollars and fifty cents, I kept seven-fifty, the people ordered them from Sears-Roebuck in Chicago. He started playing his songs in joints nearby his hometown, mostly in a owned by Colonel William Howard Stovall. In August 1941, Alan Lomax went to Stovall, Mississippi and he brought his stuff down and recorded me right in my house, Muddy recalled in Rolling Stone, and when he played back the first song I sounded just like anybodys records. Man, you dont know how I felt that Saturday afternoon when I heard that voice, later on he sent me two copies of the pressing and a check for twenty bucks, and I carried that record up to the corner and put it on the jukebox
19.
Howlin' Wolf
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Chester Arthur Burnett, known as Howlin Wolf, was a Chicago blues singer, guitarist, and harmonica player, originally from Mississippi. With a booming voice and looming physical presence, he is one of the best-known Chicago blues artists. Musician and critic Cub Koda noted, no one could match Howlin Wolf for the ability to rock the house down to the foundation while simultaneously scaring its patrons out of its wits. Producer Sam Phillips recalled, When I heard Howlin Wolf, I said and this is where the soul of man never dies. Several of his songs, including Smokestack Lightnin, Back Door Man, Killing Floor, in 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him number 51 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. Burnett was born on June 10,1910, in White Station, Mississippi and he was given the name Chester Arthur, after Chester A. Arthur, the 21st president of the United States. His physique garnered him the nicknames Big Foot Chester and Bull Cow as a man, he was 6 feet 3 inches tall. The blues historian Paul Oliver wrote that Burnett once claimed to have given his nickname by his idol Jimmie Rodgers. Burnetts parents separated when he was one year old and his mother, Gertrude, threw him out of the house while he was a child for refusing to work on the farm. He then moved in with his uncle, Will Young, who treated him badly, when he was 13, he ran away and claimed to have walked 85 miles barefoot to join his father, where he finally found a happy home with his fathers large family. In 1930, Burnett met Charlie Patton, the most popular bluesman in the Mississippi Delta at the time and he would listen to Patton play nightly from outside a nearby juke joint. There he remembered Patton playing Pony Blues, High Water Everywhere, A Spoonful Blues, the two became acquainted, and soon Patton was teaching him guitar. Burnett recalled that the first piece I ever played in my life was, a tune about hook up my pony and saddle up my black mare—Pattons Pony Blues. Burnett would perform the tricks he learned from Patton for the rest of his life. He played with Patton often in small Delta communities, Burnett was influenced by other popular blues performers of the time, including the Mississippi Sheiks, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red, Blind Blake, and Tommy Johnson. Two of the earliest songs he mastered were Jeffersons Match Box Blues and Leroy Carrs How Long, country singer Jimmie Rodgers was also an influence. Burnett tried to emulate Rodgerss blue yodel but found that his efforts sounded more like a growl or a howl, I couldnt do no yodelin, and its done me just fine. His harmonica playing was modeled after that of Sonny Boy Williamson II, lockwood, Willie Brown, Son House and Willie Johnson
20.
Matt Murphy (blues guitarist)
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Matthew Tyler Murphy, known as Matt Guitar Murphy, is an American blues guitarist. Murphy was born in Sunflower, Mississippi, and was educated in Memphis, Murphy learned to play guitar when he was a child. In 1948 he moved to Chicago, where he joined the Howlin Wolf band, Murphy worked a lot with Memphis Slim, including on his album At the Gate of Horn. He gave a performance in 1963 on the American Folk Blues Festival tour of Europe with his Matts Guitar Boogie. Freddie King is said to have admitted that he based his Hide Away on Murphys playing during this performance. In 1978, Murphy joined the Blues Brothers and he appeared in the films The Blues Brothers and Blues Brothers 2000, playing the husband of Aretha Franklin. He performed with the Blues Brothers Band until the early 2000s, Murphy suffered a stroke in 2003 but returned to perform a few years later. He played a performance with James Cotton at the 2010 Chicago Blues Festival. A1986 live recording of a performance at the 40 Watt Club, in Athens, patton Biddle recorded the show, Murphys nephew, Floyd Murphy Jr. played the drums, and Howard Eldridge provided vocals. Murphy appeared in April 2013 at Eric Claptons Crossroads Guitar Festival at Madison Square Garden in New York City, Murphys signature guitar is manufactured by Cort Guitars. He visited the Cort factory in Korea in 1998, and later year the MGM-1 was introduced. Most of these guitars have a sunburst or honey finish and they are made of agathis, with a mahogany neck, and have two humbuckers and single volume and tone controls. This model was produced until 2006,78 were sold, according to factory numbers, Murphy currently resides in Miami, Florida
21.
Delray Beach, Florida
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Delray Beach is a coastal city in Palm Beach County, Florida, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 60,522. The population was estimated at 66,255 in 2015, Delray Beach is part of the Miami metropolitan area. Recorded history began with the construction of the Orange Grove House of Refuge in 1876, settlement began around 1884, when African-Americans from the Panhandle of Florida purchased land a little inland from the Orange Grove House of Refuge and began farming. By 1894 the Black community was enough to establish the first school in the area. In 1894 William S. Initially, this community was named after Linton, in 1896 Henry Flagler extended his Florida East Coast Railroad south from West Palm Beach to Miami, with a station at Linton. The Linton settlers began to achieve success, with farming of winter vegetables for the northern market. A hard freeze in 1898 was a setback, and many of the settlers left, settlers from The Bahamas, sometimes referred to as Nassaws, began arriving in the early 1900s. The 1910 census shows Delray as a town of 904 citizens, twenty-four U. S. states and nine other countries are listed as the birthplace of its residents. Although still a town, Delray had a remarkably diverse citizenry. In 1911, the area was chartered by the State of Florida as an incorporated town, in the same year, pineapple and tomato canning plants were built. Pineapples became the crop of the area. This is reflected in the name of the present day Pineapple Grove neighborhood near downtown Delray Beach, prior to 1909, the Delray settlement land was within Dade County. That year, Palm Beach County was carved out of the portion of the region. By 1920, Delrays population had reached 1,051, the Florida land boom of the 1920s brought renewed prosperity to Delray. Tourism and real estate speculation became important parts of the local economy, Delray issued bonds to raise money to install water and sewer lines, paved streets, and sidewalks. At that time Delray was the largest town on the east coast of Florida between West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale, the collapse of the land boom in 1926 left Delray saddled with high bond debts, and greatly reduced income from property taxes. Delray was separated from the Atlantic Ocean beach by the Florida East Coast Canal, in 1923 the area between the canal and the ocean was incorporated as Delray Beach
22.
Richter-tuned harmonica
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The Richter-tuned harmonica, or 10-hole harmonica or blues harp, is the most widely known type of harmonica. It is a variety of diatonic harmonica, with ten holes which offer the player 19 notes in a three-octave range, the standard diatonic harmonica is designed to allow a player to play chords and melody in a single key. Because they are designed to be played in a single key at a time. Harps labeled G through B start below middle C, while Harps labeled D♭ through F♯ start above middle C, here is the layout for a standard diatonic harmonica, labeled C, starting on middle C. Although there are three octaves between 1 and 10 blow, there is one full major scale available on the harmonica. The lower holes are designed around the tonic and dominant chords, the most important notes are given the blow, and the secondary notes, the draw. The valved diatonic is one of the most common ways of playing chromatic scales on diatonic harmonicas, while chromatic is available, valved diatonic is also common, and there are reasons to use a valved diatonic rather than chromatics. It does not have an assembly, and it has a wider tonal range. As well, it has a size and is much more suitable to use with microphone. Alternatively, one can buy a factory-made valved diatonic such as the Suzuki Promaster Valved. The disadvantage of the valved diatonic is that it not require one to develop proper embouchure in order to bend the notes accurately. Also, many of the reached by bending are nearer just intonation. This limits the number of notes available when playing classical repertoire when compared with that of jazz or blues. Another thing worth noting is that, due to the bends being one-reed bends, the sound is less full than traditional bends. One way to address this is by having an additional reed that activates when one bends a note, aside from bending, Richter-tuned harmonicas are modal. Playing the harmonica in the key to which it is tuned is known as straight harp or first position playing, for example, playing music in the key of C on a C-tuned harmonica. More common is crossharp or second position playing which involves playing in the key which is a fourth below the key of the harmonica. This is because the notes of the G pentatonic scale are easily accessible on a C-tuned harmonica
23.
Memphis, Tennessee
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Memphis is a city in the southwestern corner of the U. S. state of Tennessee and the county seat of Shelby County. The city is located on the fourth Chickasaw Bluff, south of the confluence of the Wolf, Memphis had a population of 653,450 in 2013, making it the largest city in the state of Tennessee. It is the largest city on the Mississippi River, the third largest in the greater Southeastern United States, the greater Memphis metropolitan area, including adjacent counties in Mississippi and Arkansas, had a 2014 population of 1,317,314. This makes Memphis the second-largest metropolitan area in Tennessee, surpassed by metropolitan Nashville, Memphis is the youngest of Tennessees major cities, founded in 1819 as a planned city by a group of wealthy Americans including judge John Overton and future president Andrew Jackson. A resident of Memphis is referred to as a Memphian, and the Memphis region is known, particularly to media outlets, as Memphis and the Mid-South. Occupying a substantial bluff rising from the Mississippi River, the site of Memphis has been a location for human settlement by varying cultures over thousands of years. The historic Chickasaw Indian tribe, believed to be their descendants, French explorers led by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle and Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto would encounter the Chickasaw in that area, in the 16th century. J. D. L. Chickasaw Bluffs, located on the Mississippi River at the present day location of Memphis, spain and the United States vied for control of this site, which was a favorite of the Chickasaws. The United States gained the right to navigate the Mississippi River, the Spanish dismantled the fort, shipping its lumber and iron to their locations in Arkansas. Captain Isaac Guion led an American force down the Ohio River to claim the land, by this time, the Spanish had departed. The forts ruins went unnoticed twenty years later when Memphis was laid out as a city, the city of Memphis was founded on May 22,1819 by John Overton, James Winchester and Andrew Jackson. They named it after the ancient capital of Egypt on the Nile River, Memphis developed as a trade and transportation center in the 19th century because of its flood-free location high above the Mississippi River. Located in the delta region along the river, its outlying areas were developed as cotton plantations. The cotton economy of the antebellum South depended on the labor of large numbers of African-American slaves. Through the early 19th century, one million slaves were transported from the Upper South, Many were transported by steamboats along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. This gave planters and cotton brokers access to the Atlantic Coast for shipping cotton to England, the citys demographics changed dramatically in the 1850s and 1860s under waves of immigration and domestic migration. Due to increased immigration since the 1840s and the Great Famine, ethnic Irish made up 9.9 percent of the population in 1850, but 23.2 percent in 1860, when the total population was 22,623. They had encountered considerable discrimination in the city but by 1860 and they also gained many elected and patronage positions in the Democratic Party city government, and an Irish man was elected as mayor before the Civil War
24.
Sun Records
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Sun Records is an American independent record label founded by Sam Phillips in Memphis, Tennessee in 1952. Sun was the first company to record Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Sun Records discovered and first recorded such influential musicians as Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash. Presleys recording contract was sold to RCA Victor Records for $35,000 in 1955 to relieve Suns financial difficulties. Before those records, Sun had concentrated mainly on African-American musicians because Phillips loved rhythm and blues, Sun record producer and engineer Jack Clement discovered and recorded Jerry Lee Lewis while Phillips was away on a trip to Florida. The original Sun Records logo was designed by John Gale Parker, Jr. a resident of Memphis, Sun was founded with the financial aid of Jim Bulliet, one of many record executives for whom Phillips had scouted artists before 1952. Some of the artists at Sun were Roscoe Gordon, Rufus Thomas, Little Milton, Tex Weiss, Charlie Rich, Howlin Wolf, Bill Justis. In the Lovin Spoonful song Nashville Cats, John Sebastian used poetic license when he referred to Sun as the Yellow Sun Records from Nashville, there were also sixteen female recording artists whose records were released on the Sun and Phillips international label. These include Barbara Pittman and the Miller Sisters, in 1969, Mercury Records label producer Shelby Singleton purchased the Sun label from Phillips. Singleton merged his operations into Sun International Corporation, which re-released and re-packaged compilations of Suns early artists in the early 1970s and it later introduced rockabilly tribute singer Jimmy Orion Ellis in 1980, with Orion taking on the persona of Elvis Presley. The company remains in business as Sun Entertainment Corporation, and currently licenses its brand, Sun Entertainment also includes SSS International Records, Plantation Records, Amazon Records, Red Bird Records, Blue Cat Records among other labels the company acquired over the years. Its website sells collectible items and compact discs bearing the original 1950s Sun logo, Sun Records is located in Nashville, Tennessee. It has been mainly a reissue label since the 1970s but signed country musician Julie Roberts to a contract in 2013. The music of many Sun Records musicians helped lay part of the foundation of late 20th-century rock and roll and influenced younger musicians. In 2001, Paul McCartney appeared on a compilation album titled Good Rockin Tonight. List of record labels Elvis Presleys Sun recordings Johnny Cashs Sun recordings Roy Orbisons Sun Recordings Official website Sun Studio official site Chronology, session files, discography
25.
Sam Phillips
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He was a producer, label owner, and talent scout throughout the 1940s and 1950s. He was the founder of both Sun Studio and Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee, through Sun, Phillips discovered such recording talent as Howlin Wolf, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash. The height of his success culminated in his launching of Elvis Presleys career in 1954 and he is also associated with several other noteworthy rhythm and blues, country, and rock and roll musicians of the period. Phillips sold Sun in 1969 to Shelby Singleton and he was an early investor in the Holiday Inn chain of hotels. He also advocated racial equality and helped break down barriers in the music industry. Phillips was the youngest of eight children, born on a farm near Florence, Alabama, to tenant farmers, Madge Ella. As a child, he picked cotton in the fields with his parents alongside black laborers, the experience of hearing workers singing in the fields left a big impression on the young Phillips. Traveling through Memphis with his family in 1939 on the way to see a preacher in Dallas, he slipped off to look at Beale Street, I just fell totally in love, he later recalled. Phillips attended the former Coffee High School in Florence and he conducted the school band and had ambitions to be a criminal defense attorney. However, his father was bankrupted by the Great Depression and died in 1941, forcing Phillips to leave school to look after his mother. To support the family Phillips worked in a store and then a funeral parlor. In the 1940s, Phillips worked as a DJ and radio engineer for Muscle Shoals radio station WLAY, according to Phillips, this radio stations open format would later inspire his work in Memphis. Beginning in 1945, he worked for four years as an announcer, on January 3,1950, Phillips opened the Memphis Recording Service at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee. The Memphis Recording Service let amateurs perform, which drew performers such as B. B. King, Junior Parker, Phillips then would sell their performances to larger record labels. In addition to performances, Phillips recorded events such as weddings and funerals. The Memphis Recording Service also served as the studio for Phillipss own label, Phillips combined different styles of music. He was interested in the blues and said, The blues, it got people—black and white—to think about life, how difficult and they would sing about it, they would pray about it, they would preach about it. This is how they relieved the burden of what existed day in, the recording was released on the Chess/Checker record label in Chicago, in 1951
26.
Verve Records
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Verve Records is an American record company operating under the newly-founded Verve Label Group distributed by Interscope Geffen A&M Records. It was founded in 1956 by Norman Granz and it absorbed the catalogues of his earlier labels, Clef Records and Norgran Records, and material previously licensed to Mercury Records. It has been under ownership of Universal Music Group and has expanded to scope newer artists. Norman Granz created Verve to produce new recordings by Ella Fitzgerald, whom he managed, the catalog grew throughout the 1950s and 1960s to include Charlie Parker, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, Billie Holiday, Oscar Peterson, Ben Webster, and Lester Young. Milton Rudin, his attorney, represented Frank Sinatra and knew that Sinatra wanted his own label, Sinatra and Granz made a handshake deal, but negotiations broke down over price and Sinatras desire that Granz remain head of the label. Granz sold Verve to MGM in 1961, Sinatra established Reprise Records and hired Mo Ostin, an executive at Verve, to run it. At Verve, Creed Taylor was made head producer, Taylor adopted a more commercial approach, canceling several contracts. He brought bossa nova to America with the release of Jazz Samba by Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd, Getz/Gilberto, Verves notable arrangers included Claus Ogerman and Oliver Nelson. According to Ogerman in Jazzletter, he arranged 60–70 albums for Verve from 1963–1947, in 1964, Taylor supervised the creation of a folk music subsidiary named Verve Folkways, later renamed Verve Forecast. Taylor left Verve in 1967 to form CTI Records, aside from jazz, Verves catalogue included the Righteous Brothers, the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention, and the Blues Project. In the 1970s, Verve became part of the PolyGram, incorporating the Mercury/EmArcy jazz catalog, Verve Records became the Verve Music Group after PolyGram was merged with Seagrams Universal Music Group in 1998. The jazz holdings from the companies were folded into this sub-group. When Universal and Polygram merged in 1998, Verves holdings were merged with Universals GRP Recording Company to become Verve Music Group, after forays into Americana and adult contemporary music, Verve was corporately aligned with Universal Music Enterprises, and was no longer a stand-alone label within UMG. The Verve imprint itself manages much of the catalog that once belonged to PolyGram. Meanwhile, GRP manages the rest of MCA/Universals jazz catalog, including releases once issued on the Decca, the Verve Music Group has expanded its output beyond jazz to include crossover classical music, progressive pop and show tunes. Official site Article about Creed Taylor
27.
Mike Bloomfield
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For the astronaut, see Michael J. Bloomfield. Respected for his playing, Bloomfield knew and played with many of Chicagos blues legends before achieving his own fame and was instrumental in popularizing blues music in the mid-1960s. He was ranked number 22 on Rolling Stones list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time in 2003 and number 42 by the same magazine in 2011. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2012 and, as a member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, was inducted into the Rock, Bloomfield was born into a wealthy Chicago Jewish-American family. Bloomfields father, Harold Bloomfield, was born in Chicago in 1914, after pursuing business ventures in California during the 1920s, he returned to the city in the early 1930s. By the early 1940s Bloomfield Industries had acquired more manufacturing and warehouse space, the company expanded during World War II by manufacturing supplies needed for the war effort. Working with his brother, Daniel, and his father, Samuel, Michael Bloomfields mother was born Dorothy Klein in Chicago in 1918 and married Harold Bloomfield in 1940. She came from an artistic, musical family, and worked as an actor, Michael Bloomfields brother Allen Bloomfield was born in Chicago on Dec.24,1944. Bloomfields family lived in locations around Chicago before settling at 424 West Melrose Street on the North Side. When he was twelve his family moved to suburban Glencoe, Illinois, where he attended New Trier High School for two years. During this time, he began playing in bands, and Bloomfield put together a group called the Hurricanes, named after Ohio rock band Johnny. New Trier High School expelled Bloomfield after his band performed a raucous rock and he attended Cornwall Academy in Massachusetts for one year and then returned to Chicago, where he spent his last year of education at a local YMCA school, Central YMCA High School. He first sat in with a blues band in 1959. He performed with Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters, and many other Chicago blues performers during the early 1960s, writing in 2001, keyboardist, songwriter and record producer Al Kooper said Bloomfields talent was instantly obvious to his mentors. They knew this was not just another boy, this was someone who truly understood what the blues were all about. Among his early supporters were B. B, King, Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan and Buddy Guy. Michael used to say, Its a natural, black people suffer externally in this country. The sufferings the mutual fulcrum for the blues, in the early 1960s he met harmonica player and singer Paul Butterfield and guitarist Elvin Bishop, with whom he would later play in The Paul Butterfield Blues Band
28.
Nick Gravenites
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His parents were from Palaiochori, Arcadia, in Greece. According to author and pop music critic Joel Selvin, Gravenites is the original San Francisco connection for the Chicago crowd, Gravenites is credited as a musical handyman, helping such San Francisco bands as Quicksilver Messenger Service and Janis Joplins first solo group, the Kosmic Blues Band. He wrote several songs for Joplin, including her Woodstock hit Work Me, Lord and he also worked extensively with John Cipollina after producing the first album by Quicksilver Messenger Service. He and Cipollina formed the Nick Gravenites–John Cipollina Band, which toured throughout Europe, Gravenites was the lead singer in the re-formed Big Brother and the Holding Company from 1969 to 1972. In 1967 he formed the Electric Flag with Bloomfield, Gravenites also wrote the score for the film The Trip and produced the music for the film Steelyard Blues. He produced the pop hit One Toke Over the Line for Brewer & Shipley and he and John Kahn produced the 1970 album Not Mellowed with Age, by Southern Comfort. Gravenites often used pianist Pete Sears in his band Animal Mind, including on his 1980 Blue Star album, on which Sears played keyboards and bass. In the early 1980s, Gravenites performed and recorded with a group of San Francisco Bay area rock, blues. Their first album, The Usual Suspects, released in 1981, included Gravenites on vocals and Bloomfield, Sears, Naftalin, Taj Mahal, Darol Anger, Peter Rowan, Anna Rizzo, Ron Thompson, and others. Gravenites and Sears played together in front of 100,000 people on Earth Day 1990 at Crissy Field, Sears also joined him for a tour of Greece. Gravenites still performs live in northern California and he was inducted to the Blues Hall of Fame in 2003 for his song Born in Chicago. He has toured with the Chicago Blues Reunion and a new Electric Flag Band, Gravenites is featured in the documentary film Born in Chicago, in which he and several other Chicago natives tell of growing up with blues music in Chicago. The film was shown at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, Gravenites currently resides in Occidental, California. Official website Nick Gravenites profile at Bay Area Bands Nick Gravenites discography, forum, and marketplace at Discogs Nick Gravenites at the Internet Movie Database
29.
Grammy Award
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A Grammy Award, or Grammy, is an honor awarded by The Recording Academy to recognize outstanding achievement in the mainly English-language music industry. The annual presentation ceremony features performances by prominent artists, and the presentation of awards that have a more popular interest. It shares recognition of the industry as that of the other performance awards such as the Emmy Awards, the Tony Awards. The first Grammy Awards ceremony was held on May 4,1959, to honor, following the 2011 ceremony, The Academy overhauled many Grammy Award categories for 2012. The 59th Grammy Awards, honoring the best achievements from October 2015 to September 2016, was held on February 12,2017, the Grammys had their origin in the Hollywood Walk of Fame project in the 1950s. The music executives decided to rectify this by creating a given by their industry similar to the Oscars. This was the beginning of the National Academy of Recording Arts, after it was decided to create such an award, there was still a question of what to call it, one working title was the Eddie, to honor the inventor of the phonograph, Thomas Edison. They finally settled on using the name of the invention of Emile Berliner, the gramophone, for the awards, the number of awards given grew and fluctuated over the years with categories added and removed, at one time reaching over 100. The second Grammy Awards, also held in 1959, was the first ceremony to be televised, the gold-plated trophies, each depicting a gilded gramophone, are made and assembled by hand by Billings Artworks in Ridgway, Colorado. In 1990 the original Grammy design was revamped, changing the traditional soft lead for a stronger alloy less prone to damage, Billings developed a zinc alloy named grammium, which is trademarked. The trophies with the name engraved on them are not available until after the award announcements. By February 2009,7,578 Grammy trophies had been awarded, the General Field are four awards which are not restricted by genre. Album of the Year is awarded to the performer and the team of a full album if other than the performer. Record of the Year is awarded to the performer and the team of a single song if other than the performer. Song of the Year is awarded to the writer/composer of a single song, Best New Artist is awarded to a promising breakthrough performer who releases, during the Eligibility Year, the first recording that establishes the public identity of that artist. The only two artists to win all four of these awards are Christopher Cross, who won all four in 1980, and Adele, who won the Best New Artist award in 2009 and the other three in 2012 and 2017. Other awards are given for performance and production in specific genres, as well as for other such as artwork. Special awards are given for longer-lasting contributions to the music industry, the many other Grammy trophies are presented in a pre-telecast Premiere Ceremony earlier in the afternoon before the Grammy Awards telecast
30.
Hard Again
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Hard Again is the twelfth studio album by Muddy Waters. It was recorded by producer Johnny Winter, released on January 10,1977, Hard Again was Muddys first album on the Blue Sky label after leaving Chess Records. In August 1975, Chess Records was sold to All Platinum Records and it was sometime after this when Muddy Waters left the label and he did not record any new studio material until he signed with Johnny Winters Blue Sky label in October 1976. The sessions for Hard Again were recorded across the space of three days, producing the session was Johnny Winter and engineering the sessions was Dave Still – who previously engineered Johnnys brother Edgar, Foghat, and Alan Merrill. For the recordings Muddy used his current touring band of guitarist Bob Margolin, pianist Pinetop Perkins. Three of the songs on the album – Mannish Boy, I Want to Be Loved, and I Cant Be Satisfied – were re-recordings of songs that were previously recorded for Chess Records. One of the songs recorded, The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll, Pt.2, was co-written by Brownie McGhee and another song, Bus Driver, was co-written by T. Abrahamson. An outtake from the sessions, Walking Through the Park, appeared on the 2004 Legacy Recordings reissue CD. The album was received by music critics. Music called it an album and a return to form for Muddy Waters. Oppenheimer and Gioffre both share the opinion that Hard Again is Muddy Waters comeback album, in The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, Rolling Stone journalist Dave Marsh said Johnny Winter provided the sensitive production touch otherwise lacking on some of early 70s recordings. B. Kings Live at the Regal and Otis Spanns Walking the Blues I cant recall a better album than this. In a later review for Blender, Christgau found Muddy Waters to be in virile voice and commented that all-star musicians, Hard Again peaked at #143 on the Billboard 200, which was his first appearance on the chart since Fathers and Sons in 1969. The album won the Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording the year of its release, All songs written by McKinley Morganfield, except where indicated
31.
Johnny Winter
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John Dawson Winter III, known as Johnny Winter, was an American musician, singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer. Best known for his high-energy blues-rock albums and live performances in the late 1960s and 1970s, after his time with Waters, Winter recorded several Grammy-nominated blues albums. In 1988, he was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame and in 2003, Johnny Winter was born in Beaumont, Texas, on February 23,1944. Winter and younger brother Edgar were nurtured at an age by their parents in musical pursuits. Johnny and his brother, both of whom were born with albinism, began performing at an early age, when he was ten years old, the brothers appeared on a local childrens show with Johnny playing ukulele. His recording career began at the age of fifteen, when his band Johnny, during this same period, he was able to see performances by classic blues artists such as Muddy Waters, B. B. King, and Bobby Bland. In 1968, he released his first album The Progressive Blues Experiment, as it happened, representatives of Columbia Records were at the concert. Kings Its My Own Fault to loud applause and, within a few days, was signed to what was reportedly the largest advance in the history of the industry at that time—$600,000. Winters first Columbia album, Johnny Winter, was recorded and released in 1969, the album featured a few selections that became Winter signature songs, including his composition Dallas, John Lee Sonny Boy Williamsons Good Morning Little School Girl, and B. B. Kings Be Careful with a Fool, the albums success coincided with Imperial Records picking up The Progressive Blues Experiment for wider release. The same year, the Winter trio toured and performed at rock festivals. With brother Edgar added as a member of the group, Winter also recorded his second album, Second Winter. The two-record album, which only had three recorded sides, introduced a couple more staples of Winters concerts, including Chuck Berrys Johnny B. Goode, according to Winter, I never even met Jim Morrison. Theres a whole album of Jimi and Jim and Im supposedly on the album, Im sure I never, never played with Jim Morrison at all. I dont know how that got started, beginning in 1969, the first of numerous Johnny Winter albums was released which were cobbled together from approximately fifteen singles he recorded before signing with Columbia in 1969. Many were produced by Roy Ames, owner of Home Cooking Records/Clarity Music Publishing, according to an article from the Houston Press, Winter left town for the express purpose of getting away from him. Ames died on August 14,2003, of natural causes at age 66, as Ames left no obvious heirs, the ownership rights of the Ames master recordings remains unclear. As Winter stated in an interview when the subject of Roy Ames came up, in 1970, when his brother Edgar released a solo album Entrance and formed Edgar Winters White Trash, an R&B/jazz-rock group, the original trio disbanded
32.
Sonny Boy Williamson II
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Alex or Aleck Miller, known later in his career as Sonny Boy Williamson, was an American blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter. He was an early and influential blues harp stylist who recorded successfully in the 1950s and 1960s. Miller used various names, including Rice Miller and Little Boy Blue, before calling himself Sonny Boy Williamson, to distinguish the two, Miller has been referred to as Sonny Boy Williamson II. He first recorded with Elmore James on Dust My Broom, some of his popular songs include Dont Start Me Talkin, Help Me, Checkin Up on My Baby, and Bring It On Home. He toured Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival and recorded with English rock musicians, including the Yardbirds, the Animals, Help Me became a blues standard, and many blues and rock artists have recorded his songs. Miller was born Alex Ford on the Sara Jones Plantation in Tallahatchie County, the date and year of birth are uncertain. He lived and worked with his stepfather, Jim Miller, whose last name he soon adopted. He was also associated with Robert Johnson during this period, Miller developed his style and raffish stage persona during these years. Willie Dixon recalled seeing Lockwood and Miller playing for tips in Greenville, Mississippi and he entertained audiences with novelties such as inserting one end of the harmonica into his mouth and playing with no hands. At this time he was known as Rice Miller—a childhood nickname stemming from his love of rice. In 1941 Miller was hired to play the King Biscuit Time show, advertising the King Biscuit brand of baking flour on radio station KFFA in Helena, Arkansas, with Lockwood. Some blues scholars believe that Millers assertion he was born in 1899 was a ruse to convince audiences he was old enough to have used the name before John Lee Williamson, who was born in 1914. In 1949, Williamson relocated to West Memphis, Arkansas, and lived with his sister and her husband and he started his own KWEM radio show from 1948 to 1950, selling the elixir Hadacol. He brought his King Biscuit musician friends to West Memphis—Elmore James, Houston Stackhouse, Arthur Big Boy Crudup, Robert Nighthawk, in the 1940s Williamson married Mattie Gordon, who remained his wife until his death. McMurry later erected Williamsons headstone, near Tutwiler, Mississippi, in 1977, when Trumpet went bankrupt in 1955, Williamsons recording contract was yielded to its creditors, who sold it to Chess Records in Chicago. He had begun developing a following in Chicago beginning in 1953 and it was during his Chess years that he enjoyed his greatest success and acclaim, recording about 70 songs for the Chess subsidiary Checker Records from 1955 to 1964. His first LP record, Down and Out Blues, was released by Checker in 1959, One single, Boppin with Sonny b/w No Nights by Myself, was released by Ace Records in 1955. Around this time he was quoted as saying of the bands who accompanied him, those British boys want to play the blues real bad
33.
West Helena, Arkansas
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West Helena is the western portion of Helena-West Helena, Arkansas, a city in Phillips County, Arkansas, United States. As of the 2000 census, this portion of the city population was 8,689, historically, West Helena and its sister city Helena, located on the Mississippi River, have been two of the focal points in the history of the development of the blues. The cities consolidated on January 1,2006, Helena is the birthplace of Arkansas former Senior United States Senator Blanche Lincoln and Actor/Director/Filmmaker Chuck Williams. West Helena is located at 34°32′45″N 90°38′40″W, according to the United States Census Bureau, West Helena had a total area of 4.4 square miles, all of it land. As of the census of 2000, there were 8,689 people,3,204 households, the population density was 1,956.6 people per square mile. There were 3,518 housing units at a density of 792.2 per square mile. 1. 01% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race,27. 6% of all households were made up of individuals and 11. 5% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.71 and the family size was 3.32. In West Helena, the population is out with 34. 1% under the age of 18,10. 1% from 18 to 24,23. 9% from 25 to 44,19. 6% from 45 to 64. The median age was 30 years, for every 100 females there were 80.7 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 71.5 males, the median income for a household in West Helena is $21,130, and the median income for a family was $25,014. Males had an income of $22,971 versus $17,225 for females. The per capita income for West Helena is $11,234, about 30. 9% of families and 35. 4% of the population were below the poverty line, including 49. 5% of those under age 18 and 27. 2% of those age 65 or over. Helena-West Helena School District operates schools in what was West Helena, the climate in this area is characterized by hot, humid summers and generally mild to cool winters. According to the Köppen Climate Classification system, West Helena has a subtropical climate. Odessa Harris was an American blues and jazz singer, born in West Helena, lonnie Shields, is a present-day electric blues singer, songwriter and guitarist, who was born in West Helena. The Helena-West Helena Daily World, the newspaper serving Helena-West Helena and Phillips County
34.
Milwaukee
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Milwaukee is the largest city in the state of Wisconsin and the fifth-largest city in the Midwestern United States. The county seat of Milwaukee County, it is on Lake Michigans western shore, Milwaukees estimated population in 2015 was 600,155. Milwaukee is the cultural and economic center of the Milwaukee–Racine–Waukesha Metropolitan Area with an estimated population of 2,046,692 as of 2015. Ranked by estimated 2014 population, Milwaukee is the 31st largest city in the United States, the first Europeans to pass through the area were French Catholic missionaries and fur traders. In 1818, the French Canadian explorer Solomon Juneau settled in the area, large numbers of German immigrants helped increase the citys population during the 1840s, with Poles and other immigrants arriving in the following decades. Known for its traditions, Milwaukee is currently experiencing its largest construction boom since the 1960s. In addition, many new skyscrapers, condos, lofts and apartments have been built in neighborhoods on and near the lakefront, the word Milwaukee may come from the Potawatomi language minwaking, or Ojibwe language ominowakiing, Gathering place. The first recorded inhabitants of the Milwaukee area are the Menominee, Fox, Mascouten, Sauk, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, many of these people had lived around Green Bay before migrating to the Milwaukee area around the time of European contact. In the second half of the 18th century, the Indians at Milwaukee played a role in all the wars on the American continent. During the French and Indian War, a group of Ojibwas, in the American Revolutionary War, the Indians around Milwaukee were some of the few Indians who remained loyal to the American cause throughout the Revolution. After American independence, the Indians fought the United States in the Northwest Indian War as part of the Council of Three Fires, during the War of 1812, Indians held a council in Milwaukee in June 1812, which resulted in their decision to attack Chicago. This resulted in the Battle of Fort Dearborn on August 15,1812, the War of 1812 did not end well for the Indians, and after the Black Hawk War in 1832, the Indians in Milwaukee signed their final treaty with the United States in Chicago in 1833. This paved the way for American settlement, Europeans had arrived in the Milwaukee area prior to the 1833 Treaty of Chicago. French missionaries and traders first passed through the area in the late 17th and 18th centuries, alexis Laframboise, in 1785, coming from Michilimackinac settled a trading post, therefore, he is the first European descent resident of the Milwaukee region. Early explorers called the Milwaukee River and surrounding lands various names, Melleorki, Milwacky, Mahn-a-waukie, Milwarck, for many years, printed records gave the name as Milwaukie. One story of Milwaukees name says, ne day during the thirties of the last century a newspaper calmly changed the name to Milwaukee, the spelling Milwaukie lives on in Milwaukie, Oregon, named after the Wisconsin city in 1847, before the current spelling was universally accepted. Milwaukee has three founding fathers, Solomon Juneau, Byron Kilbourn, and George H. Walker, Solomon Juneau was the first of the three to come to the area, in 1818. He was not the first European settler but founded a town called Juneaus Side, or Juneautown, in competition with Juneau, Byron Kilbourn established Kilbourntown west of the Milwaukee River and made sure the streets running toward the river did not join with those on the east side
35.
Distortion
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Distortion is the alteration of the original shape of something, such as an object, image, sound or waveform. Distortion is usually unwanted, and so engineers strive to eliminate distortion, in some situations, however, distortion may be desirable. The important signal processing operation of heterodyning is based on nonlinear mixing of signals to cause intermodulation, Distortion is also used as a musical effect, particularly with electric guitars. The addition of noise or other outside signals is not deemed distortion, a quality measure that explicitly reflects both the noise and the distortion is the Signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio. Distortion occurs when the transfer function F is more complicated than this, if F is a linear function, for instance a filter whose gain and/or delay varies with frequency, the signal suffers linear distortion. Linear distortion does not introduce new frequency components to a signal and this diagram shows the behaviour of a signal as it is passed through various distorting functions. The first trace shows the input and it also shows the output from a non-distorting transfer function. A high-pass filter distorts the shape of a wave by reducing its low frequency components. This is the cause of the droop seen on the top of the pulses and this pulse distortion can be very significant when a train of pulses must pass through an AC-coupled amplifier. As the sine wave contains only one frequency, its shape is unaltered, a low-pass filter rounds the pulses by removing the high frequency components. All systems are low pass to some extent, note that the phase of the sine wave is different for the lowpass and the highpass cases, due to the phase distortion of the filters. A slightly non-linear transfer function, this one gently compresses the peaks of the sine wave and this generates small amounts of low order harmonics. A hard-clipping transfer function generates high order harmonics, parts of the transfer function are flat, which indicates that all information about the input signal has been lost in this region. The transfer function of an amplifier, with perfect gain. The true behavior of the system is usually different, amplitude distortion is distortion occurring in a system, subsystem, or device when the output amplitude is not a linear function of the input amplitude under specified conditions. Harmonic distortion adds overtones that are whole number multiples of a sound waves frequencies, nonlinearities that give rise to amplitude distortion in audio systems are most often measured in terms of the harmonics added to a pure sinewave fed to the system. The level at which harmonic distortion becomes audible depends on the nature of the distortion. Different types of distortion are more audible than others if the THD measurements are identical
36.
Power chord
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In guitar music, especially electric guitar, a power chord Play is a colloquial name for a chord that consists of the root note and the fifth. Power chords are played on amplified guitars, especially on electric guitar with distortion. Power chords are a key element of many styles of rock and especially in heavy metal, and punk rock. This effect is accentuated as most guitars are tuned based on equal temperament, with the result that minor thirds are narrower, however, in a power chord, the ratio between the frequencies of the root and fifth are very close to the just interval 3,2. When played through distortion, the leads to the production of partials closely related in frequency to the harmonics of the original two notes, producing a more coherent sound. Even when played without distortion, the ratios between the harmonics in the notes of a power chord can give a stark and powerful sound. Power chords also have the advantage of being relatively easy to play, allowing fast chord changes and easy incorporation into melodies. Theorists are divided on whether a chord can be considered a chord in the traditional sense. When the same interval is found in traditional and classical music, it would not usually be called a chord, and may be considered a dyad. However, the term is accepted as a pop and rock music term, most strongly associated with the electric guitar styles of hard rock, heavy metal, punk rock. The use of the power chord has, to some extent, spilled over into the vocabulary of other instrumentalists, such as keyboard. Power chords are most commonly notated 5 or, for example, C5 or C refer to playing the root and fifth. These can be inverted, so that the G is played below the C, another notation is ind, designating the chord as indeterminate. This refers to the fact that a chord is neither major nor minor. Power chords can be traced back to commercial recordings in the 1950s, link Wray is often cited as the first mainstream rock and roll musician to have used power chords, with Rumble. A later hit song built around power chords was You Really Got Me by the Kinks and this songs riffs exhibit fast power-chord changes. The Whos guitarist, Pete Townshend, performed power chords with a theatrical windmill-strum, on King Crimsons Red album, Robert Fripp thrashed with power chords. Power chords are important in many forms of rock music
37.
Electric guitar
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The vibrations of the strings are sensed by a pickup, of which the most common type is the magnetic pickup, which uses the principle of direct electromagnetic induction. The signal generated by a guitar is too weak to drive a loudspeaker, so it is plugged into a guitar amplifier before being sent to a loudspeaker. The output of a guitar is an electric signal. Invented in 1931, the electric guitar was adopted by jazz guitarists. Early proponents of the guitar on record included Les Paul, Lonnie Johnson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, T-Bone Walker. During the 1950s and 1960s, the guitar became the most important instrument in pop music. It has evolved into an instrument that is capable of a multitude of sounds and styles in genres ranging from pop and rock to country music, blues and jazz. It served as a component in the development of electric blues, rock and roll, rock music, heavy metal music. Electric guitar design and construction vary greatly in the shape of the body and the configuration of the neck, bridge, Guitars may have a fixed bridge or a spring-loaded hinged bridge that lets players bend the pitch of notes or chords up or down or perform vibrato effects. The sound of a guitar can be modified by new playing techniques such as string bending, tapping, hammering on, using audio feedback, in a small group, such as a power trio, one guitarist switches between both roles. In larger rock and metal bands, there is often a rhythm guitarist, many experiments at electrically amplifying the vibrations of a string instrument were made dating back to the early part of the 20th century. Patents from the 1910s show telephone transmitters were adapted and placed inside violins, hobbyists in the 1920s used carbon button microphones attached to the bridge, however, these detected vibration from the bridge on top of the instrument, resulting in a weak signal. With numerous people experimenting with electrical instruments in the 1920s and early 1930s, Electric guitars were originally designed by acoustic guitar makers and instrument manufacturers. Some of the earliest electric guitars adapted hollow-bodied acoustic instruments and used tungsten pickups, the first electrically amplified guitar was designed in 1931 by George Beauchamp, the general manager of the National Guitar Corporation, with Paul Barth, who was vice president. The maple body prototype for the one-piece cast aluminum frying pan was built by Harry Watson, commercial production began in late summer of 1932 by the Ro-Pat-In Corporation, in Los Angeles, a partnership of Beauchamp, Adolph Rickenbacker, and Paul Barth. In 1934, the company was renamed the Rickenbacker Electro Stringed Instrument Company, in that year Beauchamp applied for a United States patent for an Electrical Stringed Musical Instrument and the patent was issued in 1937. The Electro-Spanish Ken Roberts provided players a full 25 scale, with 17 frets free of the fretboard and it is estimated that fewer than 50 Electro-Spanish Ken Roberts were constructed between 1933 and 1937, fewer than 10 are known to survive today. The need for the guitar became apparent during the big band era as orchestras increased in size, particularly when acoustic guitars had to compete with large
38.
Got My Mojo Working
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Got My Mojo Working is a blues song written by Preston Red Foster and first recorded by Ann Cole in 1956. Muddy Waters popularized it in 1957 and the song was a feature of his performances throughout his career, a mojo is an amulet or talisman associated with hoodoo, an early African-American folk-magic belief system. Rolling Stone magazine included Waters rendition of the song is on its list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time at number 359. In 1999, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences gave it a Grammy Hall of Fame Award, the song was written by Preston Red Foster, an African-American musician unrelated to the actor of the same name. Music publisher and executive Sol Rabinowitz described Foster as one of the shyest human beings Ive ever met, with bleached blonde hair and highly modish clothing sat quietly in the courtroom. According to Rabinowitz, Foster approached him in the mid-1950s with several songs, Rabinowitz said, I realized he had a way with lyrics, and felt that he might create something really worthwhile. One day he walked in with Mo Jo, I was planning a second session with Ann Cole, and the song seemed perfect for her. She loved it and learned it in an hour and we recorded the song a few days later. She was booked for a tour throughout the South as the act for Muddy Waters. She performed with his band backing her up, I happened to see the show at a club. And heard her singing Mo Jo in the show, I had asked her not to perform any unreleased songs on stage, to avoid just this problem. Ann Cole ignored me and was singing Mo Jo all over the South with Muddys band and he went back to Chicago after the tour and told Leonard Chess of Chess Records he had written a new song that he wanted to record. It was recorded and released the week as the Ann Cole version. I called to him he had recorded a song published by my company. He signed a mechanical license agreeing to pay us royalties and I thought the problem was solved, over the years we have had legal action concerning the song, but today, that is over, and the song is now acknowledged to be Preston Fosters. Again according to Rabinowitz, royalties from the song amounted to between $20,000 and $30,000 a year in the 2000s and he said Every six months I send Preston a check. Hes basically still making a living from this song. Muddy Waters 1950 song Louisiana Blues includes a reference to acquiring a mojo, Im goin down in New Orleans, get me a hand, Im on show all you good lookin women
39.
Little Walter
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His virtuosity and musical innovations fundamentally altered many listeners expectations of what was possible on blues harmonica. He was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008 in the category Sideman, jacobs was born in 1930 in Marksville, Louisiana, and raised in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, where he learned to play the harmonica. He quit school and by the age of 12 had left rural Louisiana and travelled, working odd jobs and busking on the streets of New Orleans, Memphis, Helena and West Helena, Arkansas, and St. Louis. He honed his skills on harmonica and guitar performing with older bluesmen, including Sonny Boy Williamson II, Sunnyland Slim, Honeyboy Edwards. Arriving in Chicago in 1945, he found work as a guitarist. According to Chicago bluesman Floyd Jones, Little Walters first recording was a demo recorded soon after he arrived in Chicago. He could thus compete with any guitarists volume, in a short biographical note on Little Walter, Madison Deniro wrote that he was the first musician of any kind to purposely use electronic distortion. These and several other of his recordings, like many blues harp recordings of the era. Little Walter joined Muddy Waterss band in 1948, and by 1950 he was playing harmonica on Waterss recordings for Chess Records. The first appearance on record of Little Walters amplified harmonica was on Waterss Country Boy, as a guitarist, Little Walter recorded three songs for the small Parkway label with Waters and Baby Face Leroy Foster and on a session for Chess backing pianist Eddie Ware. His guitar playing was featured occasionally on early Chess sessions with Waters. The first completed take of the first song attempted at his debut session became his first hit, the song was Juke, and it is still the only harmonica instrumental ever to be a number-one hit on the Billboard R&B chart. Juke was the biggest hit to date for Chess and its affiliated labels and one of the biggest national R&B hits of 1952, securing Walters position on the Chess artist roster for the next decade. Following the pattern of Juke, most of Little Walters singles released in the 1950s featured a performance on one side. Many of Walters vocal numbers were written by him or Chess A&R man Willie Dixon or adapted from earlier blues themes, jacobs left Waterss band in 1952 and recruited his own backing band, the Aces, a group that was already working steadily in Chicago backing Junior Wells. The Aces—brothers David and Louis Myers on guitars and Fred Below on drums—were credited as the Jukes on most of the Little Walter records on which they played. Among others who worked in Little Walters recording and touring bands in the 1950s were the guitarists Jimmie Lee Robinson, Little Walter also occasionally included saxophone players in his touring bands during this period, among them the young Albert Ayler, and Ray Charles on one early tour. By the late 1950s, Little Walter no longer employed a regular full-time band and he also played on recordings for other labels, backing Otis Rush, Johnny Young, and Robert Nighthawk
40.
Record producer
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A record producer or music producer oversees and manages the sound recording and production of a band or performers music, which may range from recording one song to recording a lengthy concept album. A producer has many roles during the recording process, the roles of a producer vary. The producer may perform these roles himself, or help select the engineer, the producer may also pay session musicians and engineers and ensure that the entire project is completed within the record companies budget. A record producer or music producer has a broad role in overseeing and managing the recording. Producers also often take on an entrepreneurial role, with responsibility for the budget, schedules, contracts. In the 2010s, the industry has two kinds of producers with different roles, executive producer and music producer. Executive producers oversee project finances while music producers oversee the process of recording songs or albums. In most cases the producer is also a competent arranger, composer. The producer will also liaise with the engineer who concentrates on the technical aspects of recording. Noted producer Phil Ek described his role as the person who creatively guides or directs the process of making a record, indeed, in Bollywood music, the designation actually is music director. The music producers job is to create, shape, and mold a piece of music, at the beginning of record industry, producer role was technically limited to record, in one shot, artists performing live. The role of producers changed progressively over the 1950s and 1960s due to technological developments, the development of multitrack recording caused a major change in the recording process. Before multitracking, all the elements of a song had to be performed simultaneously, all of these singers and musicians had to be assembled in a large studio and the performance had to be recorded. As well, for a song that used 20 instruments, it was no longer necessary to get all the players in the studio at the same time. Examples include the rock sound effects of the 1960s, e. g. playing back the sound of recorded instruments backwards or clanging the tape to produce unique sound effects. These new instruments were electric or electronic, and thus they used instrument amplifiers, new technologies like multitracking changed the goal of recording, A producer could blend together multiple takes and edit together different sections to create the desired sound. For example, in jazz fusion Bandleader-composer Miles Davis album Bitches Brew, producers like Phil Spector and George Martin were soon creating recordings that were, in practical terms, almost impossible to realise in live performance. Producers became creative figures in the studio, other examples of such engineers includes Joe Meek, Teo Macero, Brian Wilson, and Biddu
41.
Vanguard Records
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Vanguard Records is an American record label set up in 1950 by brothers Maynard and Seymour Solomon in New York City. It started as a label, but is perhaps best known for its catalogue of recordings by a number of pivotal jazz, folk. The Bach Guild was a subsidiary label, the label was acquired by Concord Bicycle Music in April 2015. In 1953, under the direction of John Hammond, the company began the Jazz Showcase series that concentrated on mainstream jazz, recordings made at the Spirituals to Swing concerts in 1938 and 1939 were released by Vanguard in 1959. The company only intermittently pursued recording jazz after that, in the mid-1950s Vanguard signed blacklisted performers Paul Robeson and the Weavers. It continued to issue folk music with newly signed artists Joan Baez, Hedy West, the Rooftop Singers, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Country Joe and the Fish, Ian and Sylvia, and Mimi and Richard Fariña. In the summer of 1965 Maynard Solomon hired Samuel Charters to edit the tapes of the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, following that project, the company sent Charters to Chicago to capture the broad range of blues musicians there. Those sessions resulted in the 1966 three-album series titled Chicago/The Blues/Today, the albums included Junior Wells with Buddy Guy, Muddy Waterss bandmates Otis Spann and James Cotton, Otis Rush, Homesick James, Johnny Shines, Big Walter Horton, and Charlie Musselwhite. Vanguard released a number of recordings, both domestically-produced and imported. Many of the came from the United Kingdoms Pye Records label. The recordings were so exceptional that many classical radio stations programmed them. D. Q, Bach recordings, from 1965 to 1983. After entering the rock and roll market by signing Country Joe, the label stayed minimally active with specialty releases such as those by Indian classical musician and sarod virtuoso Vasant Rai. An unexpected novelty hit on Vanguard, Shaving Cream by Benny Bell, in the late 1970s Tom Paxton issued two albums, New Songs from the Briar-patch and Heroes, on the label. A few disco albums by such as Players Association were released on Vanguard without much chart impact. After this period of near-dormancy, Vanguard was sold to the Welk Music Group in 1985, the Welk Group sold the classical music catalog back to Seymour Solomon. The label also formed marketing partnerships with a number of artist-run label imprints, to include Levon Helm, Indigo Girls, in 2008, Welk Music Group began a distribution deal with EMI to handle its labels, including Vanguard. After Seymour Solomons death, Vanguard Classics was sold to Artemis Records, when Artemis folded in 2004, the Vanguard Classics catalogue was sold to Sheridan Square Entertainment, which is licensing the Vanguard Classics material. Sheridan Square eventually became IndieBlu, which was acquired by Entertainment One in 2010, Vanguard Music Group was acquired by Concord Bicycle Music in April 2015
42.
Janis Joplin
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She died of an accidental drug overdose in 1970, aged 27, after releasing three albums. A fourth album, Pearl, was released a more than three months after her death, reaching number 1 on the charts. Joplin rose to fame in 1967 during an appearance at Monterey Pop Festival, as the singer of the then little-known San Francisco psychedelic rock band Big Brother. After releasing two albums with the band, she left Big Brother to continue as a solo artist with her own backing groups, first the Kozmic Blues Band and she appeared at the Woodstock festival and the Festival Express train tour. Five singles by Joplin went into the Billboard Top 100, including Me and Bobby McGee, which reached number 1 in March 1971. Her most popular include, Piece of My Heart, Cry Baby, Down on Me, Ball n Chain, Summertime, Maybe, and Mercedes Benz. Joplin, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, was known for her performing ability. Audiences and critics alike referred to her presence as electric. Rolling Stone ranked Joplin number 46 on its 2004 list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time and she remains one of the top-selling musicians in the United States, with Recording Industry Association of America certifications of 15.5 million albums sold in the USA. Janis Lyn Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas, on January 19,1943, to Dorothy Bonita East, a registrar at a college, and her husband, Seth Ward Joplin. She had two siblings, Michael and Laura. The family attended the Church of Christ, the Joplins felt that Janis needed more attention than their other children. Primarily a painter while still in school, she first began singing blues and she attended Thomas Jefferson High School, where she was a classmate of Super Bowl winning American football coach Jimmy Johnson. She stated while in school, that she was mostly shunned. Joplin was quoted as saying, I was a misfit, I read, I painted, I thought. As a teen, she became overweight, and her skin broke out so badly she was left deep scars that required dermabrasion. Other kids at school would routinely taunt her and call her names like pig, freak, nigger lover. The campus newspaper, The Daily Texan, ran a profile of her in the issue dated July 27,1962, while at UT she performed with a folk trio called the Waller Creek Boys and frequently socialized with the staff of the campus humor magazine The Texas Ranger
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Rhythm and blues
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Rhythm and blues, often abbreviated as R&B or RnB, is a genre of popular African-American music that originated in the 1940s. In the commercial rhythm and blues music typical of the 1950s through the 1970s, R&B lyrical themes often encapsulate the African-American experience of pain and the quest for freedom and joy. Lyrics focus heavily on the themes of triumphs and failures in terms of relationships, freedom, economics, aspirations, the term rhythm and blues has undergone a number of shifts in meaning. In the early 1950s it was applied to blues records. This tangent of RnB is now known as British rhythm and blues, by the 1970s, the term rhythm and blues changed again and was used as a blanket term for soul and funk. In the 1980s, a style of R&B developed, becoming known as Contemporary R&B. It combines elements of rhythm and blues, soul, funk, pop, hip hop, popular R&B vocalists at the end of the 20th century included Michael Jackson, R. Kelly, Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston, and Mariah Carey. Although Jerry Wexler of Billboard magazine is credited with coining the term rhythm and blues as a term in the United States in 1948. It replaced the term race music, which came from within the black community. The term rhythm and blues was used by Billboard in its chart listings from June 1949 until August 1969, before the Rhythm and Blues name was instated, various record companies had already begun replacing the term race music with sepia series. In 2010 LaMont Robinson founded the Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame Museum, writer and producer Robert Palmer defined rhythm & blues as a catchall term referring to any music that was made by and for black Americans. He has used the term R&B as a synonym for jump blues, however, AllMusic separates it from jump blues because of its stronger, gospel-esque backbeat. Lawrence Cohn, author of Nothing but the Blues, writes that rhythm, according to him, the term embraced all black music except classical music and religious music, unless a gospel song sold enough to break into the charts. Well into the 21st century, the term R&B continues in use to music made by black musicians. In the commercial rhythm and blues music typical of the 1950s through the 1970s, arrangements were rehearsed to the point of effortlessness and were sometimes accompanied by background vocalists. Simple repetitive parts mesh, creating momentum and rhythmic interplay producing mellow, lilting, while singers are emotionally engaged with the lyrics, often intensely so, they remain cool, relaxed, and in control. The bands dressed in suits, and even uniforms, an associated with the modern popular music that rhythm. Lyrics often seemed fatalistic, and the music typically followed predictable patterns of chords, there was also increasing emphasis on the electric guitar as a lead instrument, as well as the piano and saxophone
44.
Bobby Bland
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Robert Calvin Bobby Bland, known professionally as Bobby Blue Bland, was an American blues and R&B singer. Bland developed a sound that mixed gospel with the blues and R&B and he was described as among the great storytellers of blues and soul music. Created tempestuous arias of love, betrayal and resignation, set against roiling, dramatic orchestrations and he was sometimes referred to as the Lion of the Blues and as the Sinatra of the Blues. His music was influenced by Nat King Cole. Bland was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1981, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, and he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame described him as second in only to B. B. King as a product of Memphiss Beale Street blues scene. Bland was born Robert Calvin Brooks in the town of Barretville. His father, I. J. Brooks, abandoned the family not long after Roberts birth, Robert later acquired the name Bland from his stepfather, Leroy Bridgeforth, who was also called Leroy Bland. Bobby Bland never graduated from school, with his mother, Bland moved to Memphis in 1947, where he started singing with local gospel groups, including the Miniatures. Between 1950 and 1952, Bland recorded unsuccessful singles for Modern Records and, at Ike Turners suggestion and he then signed a contract with Duke Records. When Bland returned to Memphis in 1954, several of his former associates and he joined Aces revue and returned to Duke Records, which was then being run by Houston entrepreneur Don Robey. According to biographer Charles Farley, Robey handed Bobby a new contract, which Bobby could not read, the deal gave Bland just half a cent per record sold, instead of the industry standard of 2 cents. Bland released his first single for Duke in 1955, unlike many blues musicians, Bland played no instrument. Blands first chart success came in 1957 with the R&B chart no.1 hit Farther Up the Road and it was followed by a series of hits on the R&B chart, including Little Boy Blue. He also shared an album with Parker, Blues Consolidated, in 1958, Blands craft was most clearly heard on a series of early-1960s releases, including Cry Cry Cry, I Pity the Fool and Turn On Your Love Light, which became a much-covered standard. Despite credits to the contrary—often claimed by Robey—many of these works were written by Joe Scott. Bland also recorded a hit version of T-Bone Walkers Call It Stormy Monday and his final R&B no.1 was Thats The Way Love Is, in 1963, but he continued to produce a consistent run of R&B chart entries through the mid-1960s. Blands records mostly sold on the R&B market rather than achieving crossover success and he had 23 Top Ten hits on the Billboard R&B chart