The Country Blues

The new profile for the North Mississippi hill country bluesman Robert Belfour is now up. Click here to read it.

The new profile for Robert Lowery is now live. Read it here.

Check out the new Op-Ed posting which explores issues of what that constitutes “Country Blues” and takes issue with purist tendencies. Click here to jump to the article.

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 new profile of author, musicologist, and one-man-band-maestro Dave Harris from British Columbia is now up.

The new profile for string dazzler Ari Eisinger is now up.

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.

Check out the new artist profile for Rick Franklin.

By popular demand, here is my personal list of favorite country and acoustic blues CDs since the blues revival in the 1960s. All of these were issued or reissued since then.