Robert "Bumps" Blackwell produced some of the first hits by Little Richard and Sam Cooke ("You Send Me") which paved the way for rock & roll and soul. Born in 1918 in Seattle, WA, he played piano in a band that included pre-stardom members Quincy Jones and Ray Charles. After a hitch in the Army, Blackwell came back to Seattle in 1949. After... [+] Read More

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Highly regarded by soul music cultists, and virtually unknown by anybody else, Howard Tate had some minor success with the Verve label in the late '60s. The singer brought a lot of blues and gospel to his phrasing, but what made him palatable to the modern R&B (and, to a lesser degree, pop) audience was the Northeast soul production of Jerry... [+] Read More

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"Reinvention" could just as easily have been Johnny "Guitar" Watson's middle name. The multi-talented performer parlayed his stunning guitar skills into a vaunted reputation as one of the hottest blues axemen on the West Coast during the 1950s. But that admirable trait wasn't paying the bills as the 1970s rolled in. So he totally changed his... [+] Read More

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Not entirely content with being a 1950s R&B star on the strength of his immortal New Orleans classic "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," singer Lloyd Price yearned for massive pop acceptance. He found it, too, with a storming rock & roll reading of the ancient blues "Stagger Lee" and the unabashedly pop-slanted "Personality" and "I'm Gonna Get Married" (the... [+] Read More

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Mike Vernon was the leading producer of the British blues boom in the late '60s, working on discs by John Mayall, Fleetwood Mac, Chicken Shack, Duster Bennett, Savoy Brown, and Ten Years After. Several of these recordings came out on Vernon's own Blue Horizon label, as well as the lesser known Vernon-run labels, Purdah and Outasite, and Vernon... [+] Read More

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A masterful songwriter whose touching blues ballad "Please Send Me Someone to Love," a multi-layered universal lament, was a number one R&B hit in 1950, Percy Mayfield had the world by the tail until a horrific 1952 auto wreck left him facially disfigured. That didn't stop the poet laureate of the blues from writing in prolific fashion, though.... [+] Read More

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So much has been said and written about the Beatles -- and their story is so mythic in its sweep -- that it's difficult to summarize their career without restating clichés that have already been digested by tens of millions of rock fans. To start with the obvious, they were the greatest and most influential act of the rock era, and introduced... [+] Read More

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