Blues You Should Know

Send us Fan Mail What would make a genteel, white  Southern lady from Mississippi want to start a company to record black blues and golspel artists,...and in the early 1950s? Find out on this episode of "Blues You Should Know" with Bob Frank. Trumpet Records didn't last very long, but while it was going, it was the only record company headquartered in Mississippi, and recorded the l...

Send us Fan Mail In honor of the recent election, this show is dedicated to the great Peach State: Georgia. All songs will either contain the word "Georgia" in the title, or will be by an artist or group whose name includes "Georgia".  Pt. 2 features Jimmy McCracklin, Gov. Jimmie Davis, the GA. Yellow Hammers, Luther "Georgia Boy" Johnson,  Ray Charles and more! Suppo...

Send us Fan Mail In honor of the recent election, this show is dedicated to the great Peach State: Georgia. All songs will either contain the word "Georgia" in the title, or will be by an artist or group whose name includes "Georgia".  Pt. 1 features Blind Blake, BBQ Bob, the Skillet Lickers, Mike Bloomfield & Maria Muldaur, Hoagy Charmichael and more! Support the show

Send us Fan Mail At f his 1941 debut recordings, Robt. Lockwood, Jr. was a finger-style, acoustic disciple of his step-father Robert Johnson. By the early 1950's, he'd transformed himself into perhaps the hottest electric lead guitarist on the Chicago recording scene. This episode tells how this happened.  Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Enter the wild and wacky world of the Harlem Hamfats, the group that combined the sophistication of Chicago & New Orleans Jazz with the deep blues of the Mississippi Delta. The blues component consisted of two of Mississippi's finest musicians, the brothers Charlie & Joe McCoy.  Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Our show today focuses on two Texans with vastly different styles. Texas Alexander was as deep and intense as a bluesman could be. An itinerant, details of his life are scant yet he recorded dozens of sides over a 25 or so year period. Eddie "Vinson was something else entirely. Called "Cleanhead" (for a process job gone horribly wrong), Eddie played alto sax and san...

Send us Fan Mail For a mere five years, the rollicking, hard-driving piano playing of Major "Big Maceo" Merriweather dominated the Chicago blues scene. Maceo was left handed, and no one before or since has been able to create the drive and beat that propelled the recordings he made with Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Boy Williamson I, and under his own name.  Sadly, a stroke in 1946...

Send us Fan Mail Robert Nighthawk (Robert Lee McCollum) was one of the few Chicago based blues guitarists to make the successful stylistic jump from pre-war acoustic blues playing to post-war electric playing. As a slide player, he was probably the primary guitar influence on Muddy Waters. In addition, he had a wonderfully wry and deceptively smooth vocal style that matched his guitar playing to a...

Send us Fan Mail Well hello everybody and welcome to “Blues You Should Know”. I’m Bob Frank and I’m the host and creator of the program. I’ve been a professional musician for the past 45 years or so; also a songwriter, a writer, an educator, a filmmaker and now a podcaster.  I originally began doing these programs as a radio show within a radio show on my friend Marty “Madcat” Puljic’s blues radio...

Send us Fan Mail Blues isn't just a male thing. Here are three wonderful, if not widely known, female blues singers that I'm just crazy about: Lil Green, Annie Laurie and Julia Lee. Give 'em a listen. I'll guarantee you fall in love with them too. Support the show

Send us Fan Mail  The community of Brownsville, Tennessee lies about 60 miles or so just East of Memphis, just a short ways off of Highway 40,  the long interstate that runs the entire width of Tennessee from North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains to the Mississippi River.  Brownsville, whose population was roughly ten thousand at the last census, has recently come to recognize two of its most acc...

Send us Fan Mail Skip James made a handful of recordings for Paramount in 1931. They sounded like nothing else anyone had ever heard and they didn't sell well. Skip dropped out of sight until 1963, when he was "rediscovered" in a hospital in Tunica, MS. Here is the story of how he picked up his career after 30+ years and became a sensation on the mid-sixties folk festival circuit. O...

Send us Fan Mail Many of the early country blues recordings we love today exist because, in the 1950s and early '60s,  an intrepid group of oddball record collectors went door-to-door in Black neighborhoods the rural South offering to buy old records. Some of them took these records and started small, independent, record labels to get this music to the modern public. Here is the story of thre...

Send us Fan Mail He was the undisputed king of the double-entendre song, but Bo Carter was also a brilliant and innovative guitarist, using unusual tunings and slipping a bit of his genius in every song.  Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Magic Sam exploded like a meteor on the national blues scene. Everyone who knew Sam liked him; he was a powerful singer with a soaring tenor voice, an imaginative songwriter, and an innovative guitarist, but bad luck hounded him throughout his short life.    Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Name me a guitar player from a well-to-do Jewish family who revolutionized blues guitar, created a sensation, then died far too young. Mike Bloomfield? Yes, but a couple of decades later Michael Mann, aka Hollywood Fats did pretty much the same thing, and came to the same tragic end. As Bloomfield essentially founded blues-rock guitar, Fats founded the West Coast school of guitar....