TheCountryBlues.com

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.