Know the story. Hear the blues differently.
Getting Ready... by Freddie King
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- Written by: Simon Godfrey
- Category: Albums
Released in 1971 on Shelter Records (catalog no. L-35625), Getting Ready...—sometimes issued simply as Getting Ready—marks a pivotal chapter in the career of the Texas-born guitar giant. It was the first of three albums Freddie King recorded for Leon Russell's independent Shelter label, and it introduced a harder, more rock-and-soul-inflected sound that would define the final phase of his career.
Recorded at the legendary Ter-Mar Chess Studios in Chicago and mixed at Ardent Studios in Memphis, the album pairs King with a formidable ensemble of rock, soul, and blues veterans, yielding what many consider his most creatively satisfying studio work.
Crazy Blues by Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds
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- Written by: Simon Godfrey
- Category: Songs
“Crazy Blues” is the landmark 1920 recording by Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds that is widely regarded as the first commercially successful blues record by a Black artist and the spark that ignited the “race records” boom. Written by Perry Bradford (originally as “Harlem Blues”), it was recorded on August 10, 1920, for Okeh Records (catalog 4169) and released later that year, with “It’s Right Here for You (If You Don’t Get It—’Taint No Fault o’ Mine)” as the B-side. Its massive sales—estimates range from 75,000 copies in the first month or two to over a million overall—proved there was a large, previously ignored market of Black record buyers and opened the doors of the recording industry to African American performers.
Mamie Smith: The First Lady of the Blues and the Woman Who Opened the Door
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- Written by: Simon Godfrey
- Category: Artists
On the afternoon of August 10, 1920, in a recording studio in New York City, a thirty-seven-year-old Black woman from Cincinnati named Mamie Smith stepped up to the horn of an acoustic recording apparatus and sang a song that would alter the trajectory of American music forever. The tune was "Crazy Blues," written by Perry Bradford, and the musicians backing her were a handpicked ensemble of African American players who would soon be known as the Jazz Hounds. What happened in that studio did not merely produce a hit record; it detonated an explosion that rippled through the entire recording industry, through the segregated theaters and juke joints of Jim Crow America, and across the Atlantic to listeners who had never before heard a Black woman sing the blues on wax. Within a month, the record sold seventy-five thousand copies. Some accounts claim it moved over a million units within a year, and eventually surpassed two million.
Read more: Mamie Smith: The First Lady of the Blues and the Woman Who Opened the Door
Brunswick Records: From Jazz Giants to Blues Legends and Soul Hits
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- Written by: Simon Godfrey
- Category: Labels
Brunswick Records is one of America’s longest-running and most historically significant record labels. Founded in 1916 by the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company, it grew into a major competitor to Victor and Columbia in the 1920s. Over the decades it passed through ownership by Warner Bros., the American Record Corporation (ARC), Columbia/CBS, and Decca/MCA, before becoming closely tied to the soul and R&B successes of the 1950s–1970s under Nat Tarnopol. While best known for popular, jazz, and later soul recordings, Brunswick (especially through its Vocalion subsidiary) also made important contributions to the documentation of blues in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Read more: Brunswick Records: From Jazz Giants to Blues Legends and Soul Hits
Right Place, Wrong Time by Otis Rush
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- Written by: Simon Godfrey
- Category: Albums
Released in 1976 on the independent Bullfrog label (catalog no. 301), Right Place, Wrong Time stands as one of the most celebrated—and most beleaguered—albums in blues history. Though it bears a 1976 release date, the music was actually recorded in February 1971 at Wally Heider's Studio in San Francisco for Capitol Records, who inexplicably shelved it for five years.
By the time it finally emerged, the moment had passed, and the album became yet another chapter in Otis Rush's long history of record-label misfortune. Yet despite the delays, Right Place, Wrong Time has since gained a reputation as some of the finest work of his career.
Down Home Blues by Ethel Waters
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- Written by: Simon Godfrey
- Category: Songs
“Down Home Blues” is a 1921 classic blues recording by Ethel Waters, one of the earliest and most important sides by a Black female vocalist in the commercial blues boom that followed Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues.” It was released on Black Swan 2010, backed with “Oh Daddy,” and became the fledgling Black-owned label’s biggest early success.
Robert Nighthawk: The Prowling Night-Hawk of the Blues
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- Written by: Simon Godfrey
- Category: Artists
There is a particular kind of blues musician who seems to exist more in rumor than in documentation, whose legend grows in direct proportion to the scarcity of his recordings, and whose influence spreads through the fingers of other players rather than through the fame of his own name. Robert Nighthawk was such a musician. He was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most important slide guitarists in the history of the blues, a player whose crystal-clear technique and brooding, atmospheric sound influenced Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Earl Hooker, and Elmore James, among countless others. He was a fixture of the Mississippi Delta juke joint circuit for three decades, a radio personality whose broadcasts reached deep into the rural South, and a recording artist whose sporadic sessions produced some of the most enduring blues records of the prewar and postwar eras. Yet he was also a man who seemed determined to evade the spotlight, a restless rambling bluesman who changed his name as often as he changed his address, who recorded under a dizzying array of pseudonyms, and who never stayed in one place long enough to build the kind of career that the music industry rewards. When he died in 1967, he left behind a body of work that could fit on a handful of compact discs, a reputation that was larger in the memories of his fellow musicians than in the consciousness of the general public, and a legacy that would take decades to be fully appreciated. To understand Robert Nighthawk is to understand the blues as a music of motion, of displacement, of constant searching, and of the stubborn belief that the next town, the next gig, the next recording session might finally be the one that changes everything.
Read more: Robert Nighthawk: The Prowling Night-Hawk of the Blues
Black Swan Records: The First Black-Owned Label That Changed Music History
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- Written by: Simon Godfrey
- Category: Labels
Black Swan Records was the first widely distributed, Black-owned and operated record label in the United States. Founded in Harlem, New York, in 1921 by entrepreneur Harry H. Pace, it aimed to record and market music by African American artists for African American audiences while promoting racial uplift through a mix of classical, spiritual, blues, and popular music. Though short-lived (active primarily 1921–1923), Black Swan played a pivotal role in the early commercial recording of Black music and helped open doors for African American performers in the industry.
Read more: Black Swan Records: The First Black-Owned Label That Changed Music History
Bricks in My Pillow by Robert Nighthawk
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- Written by: Simon Godfrey
- Category: Albums
Originally released in 1978 on Pearl Records (a subsidiary of Chicago's Delmark Records, catalog no. PL-11) and subsequently reissued on CD as Delmark DD-711, Bricks in My Pillow is not a studio album in the conventional sense but rather a compilation of Robert Nighthawk's complete recordings for the United and States labels, cut during two sessions in 1951 and 1952. These fourteen tracks—including three previously unreleased alternate takes—represent what many critics consider the finest studio work of Nighthawk's career: the moment when the Delta bluesman's electrified slide guitar met the swinging, urbane rhythm section of postwar Chicago.
You’d Better Be Sure by Ricky Allen
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- Written by: Simon Godfrey
- Category: Songs
“You’d Better Be Sure” is a 1961 Chicago soul-blues single by vocalist Ricky Allen (born Richard A. Allen, January 6, 1935 – May 29, 2005), released on Mel London’s Age Records (catalog 29102) with “You Were My Teacher” as the B-side. It became a strong local hit on the Chicago market and marked Allen’s breakthrough as one of the label’s most prolific and commercially successful artists.
Gennett Records: The Cradle of Recorded Jazz
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- Written by: Simon Godfrey
- Category: Labels
Gennett Records was a pioneering American independent record label based in Richmond, Indiana, that operated primarily from 1917 to 1934 as a division of the Starr Piano Company. Though it never rivaled the major labels in sales or distribution, Gennett holds an outsized place in music history for capturing some of the earliest and most important recordings of jazz, blues, and country music. Its modest studio beside the railroad tracks in rural Indiana became known as the “cradle of recorded jazz,” preserving foundational performances by artists who would shape 20th-century American music.
Ricky Allen: The Soul-Blues Pioneer Who Bridged Two Worlds
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- Written by: Simon Godfrey
- Category: Artists
There is a particular kind of obscurity in American music that has less to do with failure than with the cruel geometry of cultural change. Ricky Allen was not a failed musician. For the better part of a decade, he was one of the most popular artists in Chicago's Black community, a singer whose records sold in the tens of thousands, whose name appeared on marquees alongside Muddy Waters and Junior Wells, whose voice defined a transitional moment in African-American music when the electrified Delta blues of the 1950s was giving way to the soul-inflected blues of the 1960s. He had a national R&B hit. He wrote songs that became standards of the Chicago repertoire. He fronted a band that featured some of the finest musicians in the city. And yet, when the history of the blues was written by the white enthusiasts who discovered the music in the 1960s and 1970s, Allen was largely omitted. He did not fit the narrative they constructed, a narrative that privileged rural roots over urban sophistication, acoustic purity over electric amplification, and the Delta bluesman over the soul-blues crooner. Allen was too modern, too slick, too Black for the white blues revival. He sang for his own community, and when that community's tastes shifted again, toward Motown and funk and the emerging sounds of the 1970s, Allen found himself without an audience, without a record deal, and without the recognition that his talent and his contributions deserved. His story is the story of a musician who was always slightly ahead of his time, who helped to invent a genre that would not be named until after he had stopped recording, and who spent the last three decades of his life in a kind of exile from the music that had once made him a star.
Read more: Ricky Allen: The Soul-Blues Pioneer Who Bridged Two Worlds
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