The Country Blues

The new profile of Oregon based bluesman Michael “Hawkeye” Herman is now uploaded.

TheCountryBlues.com celebrates acoustic, traditional blues so it is only fitting for us to also toot the horn of the best contemporary recordings. Each year terrific acoustic albums are released and we will bestow one the “Best Album of the Year Award”. The first recognition falls on bluesman Toby Walker’s superlative album “Shake, Shake Mama.” You can read the full review here.

Throughout this year we will keep our eyes and ears out for great new releases. Anyone can submit CDs or links to sound files for consideration. The only criteria is that it needs to be acoustic and released in 2012.

The Mid-Atlantic region of the US has a rich tradition in the Piedmont country blues, a style that owes much to ragtime, traditional Appalachian Mountain music and the early country music of the 1930s. This style, characterized in part by intricate fingerpicking with alternating bass and a simultaneous syncopated melody picked on the treble strings, never really waned over the years. It was simply regional folk music played by both white and black musicians and it remained such to this day. Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Doc Boggs, Doc Watson, Nap Turner, John Jackson, John Cephas & Phil Wiggins, Warner Williams and Jay Summerour ,Elizabeth Cotton, Blind Connie Williams, Etta Baker, Jerry Ricks, Archie Edwards and Bill Harris were among the many who continued that noble tradition made famous by Blind Blake, Gary Davis, Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Willie McTell and many others along the in the East Coast from Philadelphia clear on down to the Carolinas. (Ironically, Mississippi John Hurt’s style also fits more closely to this regional style than the Delta Blues of the Mississippi.) Piedmont blues differs greatly from the other country blues styles, such as Texas, Georgia or Delta Blues. Piedmont blues is a direct continuation of ragtime fingerpicking and rarely relies on slide, for example.

The photo gallery is now up and running. Over the past decades my wife Bibiana Huang Matheis, a professional photographer, has taken photographs of the musicians I have interviewed or played with. Here are a few of the blues musicians – along with a non-blues musicians like Pete Seeger, who is in it because, well, he’s Pete Seeger.
A few of these great musicians are no longer with us and are immortalized in these photos: John Jackson, Jesse Mae Hemphill, Otha Turner, and John Cephas.

Bibiana also photographed the covershot of this website, featuring the National El Trovador guitar. Check out Bibiana’s website at www.bibiphoto.com for more wonderful artistic photography.

Dear Friends,

Here we are out the gate. August 2009 was our launch month.
Thanks to my daughter Maya for designing and setting up this website. As you can see, we are still building the site. Before long, we will offer Podcasts. We are also still trying to get photos from all the artists.

Already, we need to offer explanations. Sadly, we lost the great Piedmont bluesman John Cephas during the time when I was writing the text for the artist features. The website is devoted to contemporary bluesmen and women, but life is not permanent, as we know. Already, with John’s passing we had to confront a policy decision : We will not remove anyone from the list once they are on it. I started to write in June 2009. Everyone included was alive when we started, as this is not a history of the country blues. But, when we lose a friend, we keep the memory alive.

Please tell your friends and come back soon!

FM