Jagged Grain::Blues Archive

Blues Veneration Archive

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Ethel Waters, Vaudeville Star and pioneer of the 1920's era of Classic Female Blues. Photo from 1929.

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Bertha "Chippie" Hill, circa 1946, photo by William Gottlieb.

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Three Kings and a Queen: Bob Dylan, Victoria Spivey, John Hammond, and Big Joe Williams, 1962.

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Willie Dixon, Memphis Slim, Jump Jackson and T-Bone Walker, Nervous. From American Folk Blues Festival, 1962.

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Rare footage of the Poet Laureate of the Blues, Willie Dixon on guitar.

Willie Dixon, Weak Brain and a Narrow Mind.

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John Lee Hooker, Maudie and Tupelo, from Rare Performances: 1960.

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John Lee Hooker, It Serves Me Right to Suffer. From the Masters of Traditional American Music Series.

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Paramount Race Records Christmas Promotion from Chicago Defender

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Will the Coffin Be Your Santa Claus? Okeh Records promotional Ad from Chicago Defender

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Hound Dog Taylor's Left Hand. 

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Big Mama Thornton

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I know very little to tell you about the Blues. They always struck me as being very sad, sadder even than spirituals because their sadness is not softened with tears, but hardened with laughter, the absurd, incongruous laughter of a sadness without even a god to appeal to.

Langston Hughes, letter to Carl Van Vechten.

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Sonny Boy Williamson I, the man that made the harmonica a lead instrument.

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And, of course, that is what all of this is -- all of this: the one song, ever changing, ever reincarnated, that speaks somehow from and to and for that which is ineffable within us and without us, that is both prayer and deliverance, folly and wisdom, that inspires us to dance or smile or simply to go on, senselessly, incomprehensibly, beatifically, in the face of mortality and the truth that our lives are more ill-writ, ill-rhymed and fleeting than any song, except perhaps those songs -- that song, endlesly reincarnated -- born of that truth, be it the moon and June of that truth, or the wordless blue moan, or the rotgut or the elegant poetry of it. That nameless black-hulled ship of Ulysses, that long black train, that Terraplane, that mystery train, that Rocket '88', that Buick 6 -- same journey, same miracle, same end and endlessness.

Nick Tosches, Where Dead Voices Gather

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Mahalia Jackson. Photographed by Carl Van Vechten. 1962.

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Mahalia Jackson and "How I Made it Over." 

A favorite song of MLK Jr., Ms. Jackson performed this song before Dr. King's "I Have a Dream Speech."

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Mahalia Jackson sings "Lord, Don't Move the Mountain."

An absolutely stunning performance.