General

In my recent post on guitarist Robert Quine, I pulled together a few personal stories while carefully sidestepping any attempt to define his musical legacy. That’s better left to those who can [...]

Akron is full of entrepreneurs. Some do their work out in the open, others operate on the fringes. My old friend Jim Rauh exists somewhere in between, so when he first talked to me about his [...]

The Cavs crashed and burned, the team’s fragile chemistry in ruins. LeBron’s making noise about leaving town. The Indians can’t hold a lead, and Asdrubal Cabrera broke his arm diving for a ball. [...]

We now have nearly 40 posts completed and properly filed with the internet authorities. Not what you’d call a highly prolific output. But as my sister pointed out, what I lack in frequency I make [...]

This article was first published as “Guilty Pleasures” on Blogcritics.org. It’s all in the ear of the beholder, isn’t it? For a blues hound, a guilty pleasure might be ZZ Top. For a [...]

Another big, sprawling topic – more than one post can handle. And another cheap excuse to share a few of my favorite examples of the form. But what is jump blues, exactly? Some would describe it [...]

This is really just a cheap excuse to share a few samples of some pretty cool tunes I’ve been listening to lately. So if you’re one of those Northern Soul nuts from the UK, don’t expect me to [...]

How’s that for a blowhard title? The operative word being “moments”… which speaks to one of several fundamentally different ways that we experience music. Some folks like it in the [...]

Ah, the life of a trucker. Got me a hot rod rig with 10 forward gears and a Georgia overdrive, and I’m double-clutchin my way through this here mountain pass. There’s a tombstone every mile… I’m [...]

I recently read that Jack White (White Stripes, Dead Weather, Raconteurs) produced a new album by rockabilly queen Wanda Jackson. Sounded like the perfect deal to me – love White and love Wanda. [...]

My cousin Robert Quine was a bona fide guitar hero (number 80 on Rolling Stone’s list of “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” – right after Cliff Gallup of Be Bop a Lula fame and before [...]

It’s hard to imagine Saturday night in America without the corner-bar blues hero. Even harder trying to imagine said blues hero making it through the night without playing standards like Sweet [...]

My mom grew up on a farm in central Georgia. She was the youngest of 10 children, and her family spanned generations in a way that was unusual even for the Deep South. Her father, Wirt Little, [...]

So this guy sends me a couple of comments… How could you overlook this tune? Why didn’t you include this artist? And I tell him, write your own damn post. Well, he did… and [...]

I’m a blues hound… won’t deny it. Love the form’s many sub-genres and permutations. Hate most attempts to slap a little rouge on its cheeks and make it more presentable to [...]

Consider this the final installment in our Substance Abuse Trilogy (I’ll blame another brutal winter in the Rubber City): Athens, Ohio, was an interesting place back in the late-Seventies. [...]

I grew up listening to a lot of jazz. Not the edgy stuff. My dad mostly liked straight-ahead piano players like Oscar Peterson, Erroll Garner and Earl “Fatha” Hines. He also had those “can’t [...]

I’m guessing the first drinking song was written not long after the first alcoholic beverage was served. Something about draggin’ stone for the pharaoh – and my baby left me too. In other words, [...]

Think of the greats in any musical genre, and you’re usually thinking of a signature sound that gives the artist a distinct presence or personality. In jazz, it’s the difference between Dexter [...]

Time to dig through the old mail bag and respond to a few comments about previous posts… Most of these comments show up on the blog, but a few others take a more direct route – either via email [...]

Brother James returns with more photographs taken during several visits to Cuba over the past decade.  He provides his usual commentary under each photo, and I’ve decided to weigh in with a [...]