1.
Smithville, Georgia
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Smithville is a city in Lee County, Georgia, United States. The population was 774 at the 2000 census and it is part of the Albany, Georgia Metropolitan Statistical Area. Smithville is located at 31°54′7″N 84°15′19″W, according to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 2.5 square miles, all of it land. As of the census of 2000, there were 774 people,270 households, the population density was 303.6 people per square mile. There were 305 housing units at a density of 119.6 per square mile. The racial makeup of the city was 28. 81% White,70. 28% African American,0. 39% from other races, hispanic or Latino of any race were 1. 03% of the population. 25. 6% of all households were made up of individuals and 10. 4% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older, the average household size was 2.87 and the average family size was 3.44. In the city, the population was out with 33. 5% under the age of 18,10. 3% from 18 to 24,26. 0% from 25 to 44,20. 7% from 45 to 64. The median age was 30 years, for every 100 females there were 87.0 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 86.6 males, the median income for a household in the city was $31,500, and the median income for a family was $37,083. Males had an income of $29,375 versus $19,286 for females. The per capita income for the city was $12,193, about 23. 3% of families and 27. 7% of the population were below the poverty line, including 34. 8% of those under age 18 and 34. 5% of those age 65 or over. Bill McAfee, baseball player and mayor William J. Sears, Congressman from Florida Hudson Woodbridge, aka Tampa Red, musician in Blues Hall of Fame
2.
Chicago
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Chicago, officially the City of Chicago, is the third-most populous city in the United States. With over 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the state of Illinois, and it is the county seat of Cook County. In 2012, Chicago was listed as a global city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. Chicago has the third-largest gross metropolitan product in the United States—about $640 billion according to 2015 estimates, the city has one of the worlds largest and most diversified economies with no single industry employing more than 14% of the workforce. In 2016, Chicago hosted over 54 million domestic and international visitors, landmarks in the city include Millennium Park, Navy Pier, the Magnificent Mile, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Campus, the Willis Tower, Museum of Science and Industry, and Lincoln Park Zoo. Chicagos culture includes the arts, novels, film, theater, especially improvisational comedy. Chicago also has sports teams in each of the major professional leagues. The city has many nicknames, the best-known being the Windy City, the name Chicago is derived from a French rendering of the Native American word shikaakwa, known to botanists as Allium tricoccum, from the Miami-Illinois language. The first known reference to the site of the current city of Chicago as Checagou was by Robert de LaSalle around 1679 in a memoir, henri Joutel, in his journal of 1688, noted that the wild garlic, called chicagoua, grew abundantly in the area. In the mid-18th century, the area was inhabited by a Native American tribe known as the Potawatomi, the first known non-indigenous permanent settler in Chicago was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. Du Sable was of African and French descent and arrived in the 1780s and he is commonly known as the Founder of Chicago. In 1803, the United States Army built Fort Dearborn, which was destroyed in 1812 in the Battle of Fort Dearborn, the Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi tribes had ceded additional land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis. The Potawatomi were forcibly removed from their land after the Treaty of Chicago in 1833, on August 12,1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of about 200. Within seven years it grew to more than 4,000 people, on June 15,1835, the first public land sales began with Edmund Dick Taylor as U. S. The City of Chicago was incorporated on Saturday, March 4,1837, as the site of the Chicago Portage, the city became an important transportation hub between the eastern and western United States. Chicagos first railway, Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, and the Illinois, the canal allowed steamboats and sailing ships on the Great Lakes to connect to the Mississippi River. A flourishing economy brought residents from rural communities and immigrants from abroad, manufacturing and retail and finance sectors became dominant, influencing the American economy. The Chicago Board of Trade listed the first ever standardized exchange traded forward contracts and these issues also helped propel another Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln, to the national stage
3.
Illinois
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Illinois is a state in the midwestern region of the United States, achieving statehood in 1818. It is the 6th most populous state and 25th largest state in terms of land area, the word Illinois comes from a French rendering of a native Algonquin word. For decades, OHare International Airport has been ranked as one of the worlds busiest airports, Illinois has long had a reputation as a bellwether both in social and cultural terms and politics. With the War of 1812 Illinois growth slowed as both Native Americans and Canadian forces often raided the American Frontier, mineral finds and timber stands also had spurred immigration—by the 1810s, the Eastern U. S. Railroads arose and matured in the 1840s, and soon carried immigrants to new homes in Illinois, as well as being a resource to ship their commodity crops out to markets. Railroads freed most of the land of Illinois and other states from the tyranny of water transport. By 1900, the growth of jobs in the northern cities and coal mining in the central and southern areas attracted a new group of immigrants. Illinois was an important manufacturing center during both world wars, the Great Migration from the South established a large community of African Americans in Chicago, who created the citys famous jazz and blues cultures. Three U. S. presidents have been elected while living in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, additionally, Ronald Reagan, whose political career was based in California, was the only U. S. president born and raised in Illinois. Today, Illinois honors Lincoln with its official slogan, Land of Lincoln. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is located in the capital of Springfield. Illinois is the spelling for the early French Catholic missionaries and explorers name for the Illinois Native Americans. American scholars previously thought the name Illinois meant man or men in the Miami-Illinois language and this etymology is not supported by the Illinois language, as the word for man is ireniwa and plural men is ireniwaki. The name Illiniwek has also said to mean tribe of superior men. The name Illinois derives from the Miami-Illinois verb irenwe·wa he speaks the regular way and this was taken into the Ojibwe language, perhaps in the Ottawa dialect, and modified into ilinwe·. The French borrowed these forms, changing the ending to spell it as -ois. The current spelling form, Illinois, began to appear in the early 1670s, the Illinois name for themselves, as attested in all three of the French missionary-period dictionaries of Illinois, was Inoka, of unknown meaning and unrelated to the other terms. American Indians of successive cultures lived along the waterways of the Illinois area for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans, the Koster Site has been excavated and demonstrates 7,000 years of continuous habitation
4.
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
5.
Piano
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The piano is an acoustic, stringed musical instrument invented around the year 1700, in which the strings are struck by hammers. It is played using a keyboard, which is a row of keys that the performer presses down or strikes with the fingers and thumbs of both hands to cause the hammers to strike the strings. The word piano is a form of pianoforte, the Italian term for the early 1700s versions of the instrument. The first fortepianos in the 1700s had a sound and smaller dynamic range. An acoustic piano usually has a wooden case surrounding the soundboard and metal strings. Pressing one or more keys on the keyboard causes a padded hammer to strike the strings. The hammer rebounds from the strings, and the continue to vibrate at their resonant frequency. These vibrations are transmitted through a bridge to a soundboard that amplifies by more efficiently coupling the acoustic energy to the air, when the key is released, a damper stops the strings vibration, ending the sound. Notes can be sustained, even when the keys are released by the fingers and thumbs and this means that the piano can play 88 different pitches, going from the deepest bass range to the highest treble. The black keys are for the accidentals, which are needed to play in all twelve keys, more rarely, some pianos have additional keys. Most notes have three strings, except for the bass that graduates from one to two, the strings are sounded when keys are pressed or struck, and silenced by dampers when the hands are lifted from the keyboard. There are two types of piano, the grand piano and the upright piano. The grand piano is used for Classical solos, chamber music and art song and it is used in jazz. The upright piano, which is compact, is the most popular type, as they are a better size for use in private homes for domestic music-making. During the nineteenth century, music publishers produced many works in arrangements for piano, so that music lovers could play. The piano is widely employed in classical, jazz, traditional and popular music for solo and ensemble performances, accompaniment, with technological advances, amplified electric pianos, electronic pianos, and digital pianos have also been developed. The electric piano became an instrument in the 1960s and 1970s genres of jazz fusion, funk music. The piano was founded on earlier technological innovations in keyboard instruments, pipe organs have been used since Antiquity, and as such, the development of pipe organs enabled instrument builders to learn about creating keyboard mechanisms for sounding pitches
6.
Slide guitar
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Slide guitar is a particular method or technique for playing the guitar. Instead of altering the pitch of the strings in the manner, an object called a slide is placed upon the string to vary its vibrating length. This slide can then be moved along the string without lifting, creating smooth transitions in pitch and allowing wide, Slide guitar is most often played, With the guitar in the normal position, using a slide on one of the fingers of the left hand. This same technique is used to play steel guitar and the Dobro resonator guitar used in Bluegrass music. The technique of using a slide on a string has been traced to one-stringed African instruments similar to a Diddley bow, the technique was made popular by African American blues artists. The first musician recorded using the style was Sylvester Weaver, who recorded two solo pieces Guitar Blues and Guitar Rag in 1923, Blues legend Muddy Waters was also very influential, particularly in developing the electric Chicago blues slide guitar from the acoustic Mississippi Delta slide guitar. Texas blues musician Johnny Winter developed his style through years of touring with Waters. Slide player Roy Rogers honed his skills by touring with blues artist John Lee Hooker. John Lees cousin Earl Hooker may have been the first to use wah-wah, the sound has since become commonplace in country and Hawaiian music. The Rolling Stones featured a guitar as early as their 1963 recording of the John Lennon/Paul McCartney song I Wanna Be Your Man. Guitarist Brian Jones played slide in a very blues-oriented style, Jones was also one of the first English guitarists to play slide and during the bands early years, he was considered one of the best slide guitarists in the music world. His successors Mick Taylor and Ronnie Wood also displayed their own slide guitar skills while with the band, the album Let It Bleed features Keith Richards on slide guitar for the majority of the album, since the band were in-between guitarists during the making of the album. Rolling Stones vocalist Mick Jagger has also played guitar on occasion. Canned Heats Alan Wilson also helped bring slide guitar to music in the late 1960s. George Harrison experimented with slide guitar during the half of The Beatles career, first using the technique on an early outtake recording of Strawberry Fields Forever. The 1965 songs Drive My Car, and Run For Your Life have slide guitar, Harrison later used slide extensively in his solo career, on songs such as My Sweet Lord, Give Me Love, This Is Love, and Cheer Down. He played slide in the Traveling Wilburys as well as on The Beatles 1995 and 1996 reunion singles Free as a Bird, slides may be used on any guitar, but slides generally and steels in particular are often used on instruments specifically made to play in this manner. Often, the strings are raised a little higher off the fingerboard than they would be for conventional guitar playing—especially if the player isnt going to use the fingers for fretting
7.
Kazoo
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The kazoo is a musical instrument that adds a buzzing timbral quality to a players voice when the player vocalizes into it. It is a type of mirliton, which is a membranophone, one of a class of instruments which modifies its players voice by way of a vibrating membrane, a kazoo player hums, rather than blows, into the instrument. The oscillating air pressure of the hum makes the kazoos membrane vibrate, the resulting sound varies in pitch and loudness with the players humming. Players can produce different sounds by singing specific syllables such as doo, similar hide-covered vibrating and voice-changing instruments have been used in Africa for hundreds of years, often for ceremonial purposes. A popular belief is that Alabama Vest, an African-American in Macon, however, there is no documentation to support that claim. The first documented appearance of a kazoo was that created by an American inventor, Warren Herbert Frost, the patent states, This instrument or toy, to which I propose to give the name kazoo. Frosts kazoo did not look like present-day submarine-shaped kazoos, the modern kazoo—also the first one made of metal—was patented by George D. Smith of Buffalo, New York, May 27,1902. These machines were used for many decades, by 1994, the company produced 1.5 million kazoos per year and was the only manufacturer of metal kazoos in North America. The factory, in nearly its original configuration, is now called The Kazoo Factory and it is still operating, and it is open to the public for tours. In 2010, The Kazoo Museum opened in Beaufort, South Carolina with exhibits on kazoo history, the kazoo is played professionally in jug bands and comedy music, and by amateurs everywhere. It is among the instruments developed in the United States. In North East England and South Wales, kazoos play an important role in jazz bands. During Carnival, players use kazoos in the Carnival of Cádiz in Spain, in the Original Dixieland Jass Band 1921 recording of Crazy Blues, what the casual listener might mistake for a trombone solo is actually a kazoo solo by drummer Tony Sbarbaro or Red McKenzie. The Mound City Blue Blowers had a number of hit records in the early 1920s featuring Dick Slevin on metal kazoo. The vocaphone, a kind of kazoo with a tone, was occasionally featured in Paul Whitemans Orchestra. Trombonist-vocalist Jack Fulton played it on Whitemans recording of Vilia and Frankie Trumbauers Medley of Isham Jones Dance Hits, the Mills Brothers vocal group originally started in vaudeville as a kazoo quartet, playing four-part harmony on kazoo with one brother accompanying them on guitar. The kazoo is rare in European classical music, leonard Bernstein included a segment for kazoo ensemble in the First Introit of his Mass. The brief passages have the kazoo chorus sliding up and down the scale as the cheering rises, jesse Fullers 1962 recording of his song San Francisco Bay Blues features a kazoo solo, as does Eric Claptons 1992 recording of the song on MTVs Unplugged television show and album
8.
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
9.
Big Bill Broonzy
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Big Bill Broonzy was an American blues singer, songwriter and guitarist. His career began in the 1920s when he played country blues to mostly African-American audiences, through the 1930s and 1940s he successfully navigated a transition in style to a more urban blues sound popular with working-class African-American audiences. In the 1950s a return to his traditional folk-blues roots made him one of the figures of the emerging American folk music revival. His long and varied career marks him as one of the key figures in the development of music in the 20th century. Broonzy copyrighted more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including adaptations of traditional folk songs and original blues songs. As a blues composer, he was unique in writing songs that reflected his rural-to-urban experiences, born Lee Conley Bradley, he was one of the seventeen children of Frank Broonzy and Mittie Belcher. The date and place of his birth are disputed, Broonzy claimed to have been born in Scott, Mississippi, but a body of emerging research compiled by the blues historian Robert Reisman suggests that he was born in Jefferson County, Arkansas. Broonzy claimed he was born in 1893, and many sources report that year, soon after his birth the family moved to an area near Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where Bill spent his youth. He began playing music at an early age, at the age of 10 he made himself a fiddle from a cigar box and learned how to play spirituals and folk songs from his uncle, Jerry Belcher. He and a friend, Louis Carter, who played a guitar, began performing at social. These early performances included playing at two-stages, picnics where whites and blacks danced at the same event, on the understanding that he was born in 1898 rather than earlier or later, sources suggest that in 1915, 17-year-old Broonzy was married and working as a sharecropper. He had given up playing the fiddle and had become a preacher, there is a story that he was offered $50 and a new violin if he would play for four days at a local venue. Before he could respond to the offer, his wife took the money and spent it, in 1916 his crop and stock were wiped out by drought. Broonzy went to work locally until he was drafted into the Army in 1917 and he served for two years in Europe during the First World War. He immediately left Pine Bluff and moved to the Little Rock area, a year later, in 1920, he moved north to Chicago in search of opportunity. After arriving in Chicago, Broonzy switched from fiddle to guitar and he learned to play the guitar from the veteran minstrel and medicine show performer Papa Charlie Jackson, who began recording for Paramount Records in 1924. Through the 1920s Broonzy worked at a string of odd jobs, including Pullman porter, cook, foundry worker and custodian, to supplement his income and he played regularly at rent parties and social gatherings, steadily improving his guitar playing. During this time he wrote one of his tunes, a solo guitar piece called Saturday Night Rub
10.
Robert Nighthawk
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Robert Lee McCollum was an American blues musician who played and recorded under the pseudonyms Robert Lee McCoy and Robert Nighthawk. He was the father of the blues musician Sam Carr, born in Helena, Arkansas, he left home at an early age to become a busking musician. After a period wandering through southern Mississippi, he settled for a time in Memphis, Tennessee, a particular influence during this period was Houston Stackhouse, from whom he learned to play slide guitar and with whom he performed on the radio in Jackson, Mississippi. After further travels through Mississippi, he found it advisable to take his mothers name and, as Robert Lee McCoy, moved to St. Louis, Missouri, local musicians with whom he played included Henry Townsend, Big Joe Williams, and Sonny Boy Williamson. Kansas City Red was his drummer from the early 1940s to around 1946 and he recorded Kansas City Red’s song The Moon Is Rising. McCoy became a voice on local radio stations. Within a few years, he resurfaced as the slide guitarist Robert Nighthawk and began recording for Aristocrat and Chess Records. In 1949 and 1950, the two styles were close enough that they were in competition for promotional activity. Waters was the more marketable commodity, being reliable and a more confident stage communicator. Nighthawk continued to perform and record, taking up with United Records and States Records 1951 and 1952 and he continued giving live performances on Chicagos Maxwell Street until 1964. He had a stroke followed by an attack and died of heart failure at his home in Helena. He is buried in Magnolia Cemetery, in Helena, the Mississippi Blues Commission honored Nighthawk with a historical marker in Friars Point, Mississippi, on the Mississippi Blues Trail. The marker was placed at Friars Point because Nighthawk called the town his home at times in his itinerant career. He recorded the song Friars Point Blues in 1940
