by Paul Merry | Sep 14, 2018 | blogs, stories |
How ironic is it that white kids living in England in the mid-1960s were more exposed to black American blues than your average white teenager in the United States? Without knowing it, in 1950s England, I’d heard the blues of Lead Belly, Leroy Carr and Little Son Joe,...
by Paul Merry | Aug 10, 2018 | blogs, stories, Uncategorized |
Black guitar owners – rare as gelding balls before 1890s. If you read my last post, you’ll know I featured Henry Sloan, the African-American farmer in Mississippi who taught Charlie Patton how to play early Delta Blues guitar around the turn of the 20th...
by Paul Merry | Jul 19, 2018 | blogs, stories |
“Always fun reading, Paul. Thanks.” Jason Vivone (@JVivone), leader of the Billy Bats, Kansas City. In this short series, I’m going to highlight four extremely influential, but mainly unknown nineteenth-century blues guitar pioneers, each of whom...
by Paul Merry | Jun 25, 2018 | blogs, stories |
North East Texas. 1899. A tender-aged ‘songster’, as roaming black minstrels were known back then, had travelled from his home in Louisiana around 1899 to busk in neighbouring Texas. Whether the boy was 10, 11 or 14 depends on which birth date you believe – 1885, 1888...
by Paul Merry | Apr 20, 2018 | blogs, stories |
George W. Thomas Jnr, Hersal and Hociel Thomas, Sippie Wallace (nee Thomas) and Bernice Edwards. Last time, we talked about the family of Henderson Chatmon, the ‘musicianer’, as musicians called themselves in the nineteenth century, from Bolton, Mississippi....
by Paul Merry | Apr 16, 2018 | blogs, stories |
Is Bolton, Mississippi, the true birthplace of the blues? Anyone who knows the Mississippi Sheiks knows, at their core, were three sons of the nineteenth century ‘musicianer’, Henderson Chatmon, a one-time slave from Terry, Mississippi, noted for his brilliant violin...
by Paul Merry | Apr 4, 2018 | blogs, stories |
Americans should stop abusing Eric Clapton. He was a phenomenally good blues guitarist. There’s been much hullabaloo recently on social media over racist comments made by the guitarist Eric Clapton while off his head on booze and drugs 42 long years ago. This took...
by Paul Merry | Mar 17, 2018 | blogs, stories |
Updated: Oct 17 2018 Once rock music was simple. We had hard rock and not-so-hard rock, otherwise called pop. Soft rock was yet to evolve. So, when a certain rock ‘n’ roll themed restaurant first opened its doors in London in 1971, its owners named it...
by Paul Merry | Mar 9, 2018 | blogs, stories, Uncategorized |
An unbelievable true story crying out to be told. Below is a rough cut of my latest historical documentary, Battle for San Francisco. It’s a true story seemingly whitewashed from history. While not about my usual historic blues or rock, the soundtrack does...
by Paul Merry | Dec 13, 2017 | blogs, stories |
If you like your rock hard, you love AC/DC. But how did they get such a punch-in-the-guts sound? Nothing comes from nowhere, does it? Above is a trailer for parts one and two of a superb film that tells all. It’s called “Blood & Thunder: The Sound of...
