This is the grave of Otis Spann. We don't actually know when Spann was born. The grave says in 1930 and some agree. Others say he was born in 1924. Probably it is the latter, based on the work of researchers wrote a biography that...
blues
This is the grave of Big Bill Broonzy. Born possibly in 1893, but also possibly in 1903 (big discrepancy!), Lee Bradley was one of 17 children his parents had. He.
This is the grave of Willie Dixon. Born in 1915 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Dixon grew up very poor. He was one of 14 children in the family. He got into.
This is the grave of W.C. Handy. Born in 1873 in Florence, Alabama, William Christopher Handy grew up in the poor but respectable Black community there. His father was a minister at a small AME church. Handy had a strict religious upbringing and of the...
I don't often read scholarly music books, but I just finished B. Brian Foster's, 2020 book, I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life. Foster.
This is the grave of Edith Wilson. Born in 1896 in Louisville, Edith Goodall stayed in Louisville into her twenties and began to sing publicly, at least by 1919 in.
This is the grave of Pinetop Perkins. Born in Belzoni, Mississippi in 1913, Joe Perkins grew up as a sharecropper. This was the reality of Black life in Mississippi at this time. He was functionally illiterate, having only received a third grade education. This was...
This is the grave of Freddie King. Born in Gilmer, Texas in 1934, King grew up first in Dallas and then in Chicago. This was the standard Great Migration pattern.
This is the grave of Mississippi Fred McDowell. Born in 1904 in Rossville, Tennessee, McDowell grew up in the sharecropping world of Jim Crow. His family picked cotton. His parents.
This is the grave of Mississippi John Hurt. Born in 1893 in Teoc, Mississippi, John Hurt grew up as part of the impoverished sharecropping Black working class of the South. He learned to play guitar as a kid and started playing at dances by the...
This is the grave of Sonny Boy Williamson. Born at some point in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century and probably either in Greenwood or Glendora, Mississippi, Aleck Miller,.
This is the grave of John Cephas. Born in 1930 in Washington, D.C., Cephas grew up in Bowling Green, Virginia. His father was a Baptist minister so he grew up.