The blooming of Bob Dylan

The blooming of Bob Dylan

  Blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield’s part in the blooming of Bob Dylan and how Bob went electric way before 1965. To folk music fans of yesteryear, this is going to sound like sacrilege; so please excuse me. But I loved it when Bob Dylan went electric. It brought him out of that touchy-feely folky scene and into the…

The YZ of blues and a few numbers. Final part of AMERICA’S Gift Index

The YZ of blues and a few numbers. Final part of AMERICA’S Gift Index

The minuscule YZ of blues. The final two letters of the AMERICA’S Gift index, plus some numbers.    A Ziegfeld girl   Why is AMERICA’S Gift’s YZ index so brief?  It goes to show just how few people, places and songs, in the blues lexicon, begin with Y or Z. Virginia Liston’s raunchy old blues song ‘You’ve Got The…

The VW of blues … VW figures that DON’T lie

The VW of blues … VW figures that DON’T lie

  America’s Gift’s VW Index. Where the figures aren’t fudged.  As you might expect, the entertainment genre, ‘vaudeville’, features on many pages in the book because that’s where most entertainers playing prototype blues in the early twentieth century were performing. You’ll see Muddy Waters gets quite a few mentions, too, even though AMERICA’S Gift doesn’t reinvent the…