Blues Progressions

A kid who's supposed to be asleep, a radio turned down low, and a man hollering along with a record and slapping time on a telephone book. He didn't write it, play on it, or even invent the name he hung on it — but he's the one who carried it through the bedroom wall. - The correction up front: Freed did not invent the music and did not coin the phrase — "rocking and rolling", it runs from sailors...

Pull out the first Rolling Stones, Cream, Doors, and Led Zeppelin albums and read the small print — the same songwriter's name is on every one. He was a six-foot-six former boxer playing upright bass in a Chicago studio. The series question this time: whose songs provided the vocabulary? Vicksburg to Chicago: his mother's rhymes, gospel harmony, Golden Gloves boxing, a tin-can bass, and a wartime...

The question: where did regional American styles collide on tape? After the tools (Les Paul, Fender & Fullerton), the room Sam Phillips before Sun: an Alabama farm childhood full of unsorted music, Beale Street at sixteen, a radio engineer's ears The Memphis Recording Service at 706 Union Avenue: an 18-by-33-foot tiled room tuned by hand-claps, a used mono console, "We record anything, anywher...

The episode's question: how did affordable, durable, electrified gear reach working musicians? Leo Fender — orange-grove kid, bookkeeper, radio repairman; Fender Radio Service (1938), public address systems, Doc Kauffman and K&F George Fullerton — machinist and weekend band player, hired February 1948; what he is (and isn't) credited with The contrast with last episode: Les Paul the inventor-p...

A guitar made out of a four-by-four fence post, laughed out of Gibson as "a broomstick with pickups" — and the same man in his garage stacking his own guitar eight times over. The tinkerer who gave rock its guitar and its studio. Series setup: rock was built by a network of builders, not one inventor — six episodes, six architects (the previous series was the instruments; this one is who made them...

Clap on the two and the four — that push you just felt is the backbeat, the heartbeat of rock and roll. The finale: the instrument that turns a lonely blues into a whole band and decides if a room catches fire. The blues started without drums (solo Delta guitar + foot stomps); the drum kit is a 20th-century American invention out of New Orleans The jug-band percussion tradition; the humble hi-hat...

Drop your attention to the very bottom of a song — that low, round thing you feel in your chest more than you hear. Almost nobody notices it, and it's holding the whole song together. The hidden engine. The bass's unique job: the hinge between rhythm and harmony — root notes define the chords, the kick-lock ("the pocket") drives the groove Why bass is felt: the physics of low frequencies working o...

One beat-up upright, one player, and a left hand rolling like a freight train — and suddenly one person is the whole band. The most underappreciated instrument in blues rock: the piano. The barrelhouse: rough sawmill/turpentine joints where one pianist was the entire band The two-hand division of labor: left hand = bass + drums, right hand = bluesy melody Boogie-woogie: the relentless rolling left...

A few bucks, fits in your pocket, no strings or keys — and in the right hands, cupped around a mic, it moans like a sax and cuts through a whole band like a siren. The biggest small instrument in the blues. What a harmonica actually is: free reeds, the ten-hole diatonic, cheap Hohner Marine Band, the "Mississippi saxophone" The two magic tricks: bending (shaping the note inside your throat) and cr...

The problem amplification solved: guitar from background rhythm to lead voice Pickups, sustain, grit — why an electric guitar is a new instrument, not a loud acoustic Charlie Christian invents the guitar solo; T-Bone Walker invents electric blues lead ("Stormy Monday") Muddy Waters' Delta muscle; jump blues; Chuck Berry as the blues→rock-and-roll hinge The solidbody revolution: Fender Telecaster/S...

There's a sound in the blues that doesn't play notes so much as it cries them. That's slide guitar — the instrument that sounds most like a human voice weeping and singing at once. We start the series here. Why slide sounds like a voice: gliding between pitches, no frets, the notes between the notes Delta roots: W.C. Handy's Tutwiler train-station encounter, the diddley bow, Hawaiian steel, resona...

The finale brings it home to right now. Joe Bonamassa as the model for the modern DIY blues-rock empire (and his Royal Albert Hall night with Clapton); Gary Clark Jr. fusing the blues with everything modern ("This Land"); Kingfish carrying it straight out of Clarksdale, mentored by Buddy Guy — the living, unbroken chain. The 2000s garage-blues wave (White Stripes, Black Keys) that snuck the blues...

The loudest, most virtuosic chapter. The power trio as an invention (Cream) that forces the guitar into godhood; the extended live jam traced straight back to call-and-response; "Crossroads" as a Robert Johnson song turned rocket; the Marshall-stack volume arms race; Clapton and Duane Allman's "Layla" crossing threads with the Southern Rock series. Then Hendrix — a chitlin'-circuit bluesman to the...

The wilderness and the morning after. How disco, punk, new wave, and hair metal pushed blues rock to the margins (Muddy Waters died in '83; the industry called the blues a museum piece) — and how it survived underground in clubs, festivals (the Chicago Blues Festival launched in '84), and the hands of the faithful. Robert Cray and George Thorogood cracking the door; then the full revival: Bonnie R...

The hinge of the series — the blues comes home to America, to Texas. The Lone Star blues bloodline (T-Bone Walker's "Stormy Monday," Lightnin' Hopkins, Freddie King); ZZ Top as a ferocious blues-rock power trio hiding inside MTV fame ("La Grange" off John Lee Hooker); the Austin scene at Antone's where young players learned from the masters in person. Then the centerpiece: Stevie Ray Vaughan and D...

The fuse from Episode 1 catches. How a generation of British kids fell for American blues records and handed the music back louder: Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated as the hub; the underground club scene (the Marquee, Eel Pie Island); the race-and-radio reason it took outsiders; the Rolling Stones as a Chess cover band; the Animals and Them; John Mayall's Bluesbreakers as the guitar-hero factory...

The opener of a brand-new six-part series — with a warm welcome back to the Southern Rock (Southbound) crowd and an open door for newcomers. We define blues rock (the blues plus rock volume, drums, and attitude), then lay the foundation: the 12-bar form and the bent blue note; the Great Migration that carried the Delta to Chicago; Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon and Chess Records; Little...

Fresh on the heels of my series on Southern Rock, I am launching the next series on Blues Rock starting July 17!

A band like Blackberry Smoke or the Marcus King Band walks out to a sold-out room tonight — and you can’t quite name what it is. Southern Rock? Blues-rock? Country? Americana? All of it? The finale brings the whole story home: who carries it now, how it evolved, and how a porch sound went global. 

1980: Capricorn Records goes bankrupt and the press writes the obituary — Southern Rock is dead. They got it completely wrong. It didn’t die; it went underground, and the faithful kept the fire lit in the small rooms. The host was one of them — behind the board for a Jersey cover band. 

The same five Southern Rock songs play on every classic rock station, forever — but somebody chose them, and somebody froze this music in place. What got frozen along with it — the flags, the myths, the arguments — is the hardest, most honest episode in the series. And the host doesn’t dodge any of it, including his own history with the flag. 

Everybody knows “Free Bird” — it’s a punchline now, the thing people yell as a joke. But that song, and a dozen like it, came out of one white-hot five-year explosion of Southern music. This is the peak: Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker, Charlie Daniels — and the fire that took some of the best of them. 

A grieving manager who’d just buried Otis Redding bets a whole record label on a band with two lead guitarists and two drummers. The town is Macon. The label is Capricorn. This is the room where Southern Rock got its name. 

Welcome back! After a long absence, I would like to welcome you back to Blues Progressions. With the help of AI, I am now able to keep up with work and my side projects. This is the first of a six parts series of the Sub-Genre: Southern Rock. As a long time fan I am thrilled to have it's histroy presented to you. Look for a weekly episode throughout this series!

The Blues are the roots of a tall musical tree. One of those branches is Jazz. In this episode we take a short journey through the influence of the Blues on the creation and evolution of Jazz.