On a cold winter morning, before you had your first cup of coffee, Hubert Sumlin’s guitar was permanently hushed in a funeral home in an anonymous town in New Jersey. Mick Jagger and Keef footed the bill because that’s what you do when you have a billion bucks built off the clean yet filthy guitar […]

Happy 75th birthday to Buddy Guy, one of the greatest guitarists ever to inhale. For those unawares, this is the original version of “Hound Dog,” by Big Mama Thornton, the original Queen of soul. It’s high time, I did a blues week.

“The real old blues don’t call for no jumping…They can name it the blues, but that ain’t the blues. The blues is just by itself. When you’re lonesome and worried and don’t know what to do…You wants to see them, wonder where they at, wonder where they’re going. Wonder why they ain’t seeing me. I […]

If the name Alan Lomax doesn’t ring strike a dulcimer chord, his Wikipedia page provides a solid but superficial account of his achievements. The son of legendary ethnomusicologist John A. Lomax, deserves similar canonization for his work in cataloguing the ancient folk, blues, and ballads of the South, the Appalachians, and Haiti. An oral historian […]

Recovery is a bitch. While various factions of PoW recover from the promotion (or in my case, attendance) of various shows, here’s an oldie but a goodie. I suppose that like the Beatles, The Stones are relegated to a state of perpetual uncool on account of a generation of geriatrics deifying them; that and the […]

Yesterday was my 28th birthday. It’s a strange age to be, though I suspect they all are. You’re too old to qualify as young, but not nearly old enough to avoid eye rolls and the occasional kidney kick from people when you complain that you feel prematurely ancient. The born day mention isn’t intended to […]