‘When the Train Comes Back’ – Chicken Shack / Fleetwood Mac 1968 BBC performance, Album version, Single Version, Fleetwood Mac (BBC1-TV “Black, White & Blues”) Christine Anne Perfect was born in Bouth, Lancashire on July 12, 1943 Her Father was a concert violinist and music lecturer at St. Peter’s College of Education in Birmingham. Her […]
“The Blues of Otis Spann” (Decca 1964) / “Raw Blues” (Ace of Clubs 1967) ‘Stirs Me Up’ (Decca 45) Muddy Waters made his first trip to the U.K. in 1958, at the invitation of Chris Barber. Rather than bring his full band, he brought only his best friend, pianist Otis Spann. Barber had been […]
Elmore James / Fleetwood Mac / The Nighthawks / Peter Green Splinter Group It probably wasn’t difficult to justify, (to himself, anyway), Elmore James’s aversion to contracts. He had signed on with Trumpet Records in January of 1951, mainly working on sessions for other artists on the label, notably Sonny Boy Williamson II. He also […]
Eric Clapton & Jimmy Page meet Otis Spann & Muddy Waters Born March 21, 1930, Otis Spann had made his recorded debut in 1953 as a member of Muddy Waters’ band. He released a lone single under his own name a year later, but recording opportunities were scarce for the pianist after that. He cut […]
January 05, 1944 – October 21, 1990 One can only guess as to where Kelly’s preternatural understanding of the blues idiom came from. More so than almost all of her contemporaries, she truly seemed born to “sing and play the blues”. There is never anything forced about her singing, never a sense that she […]
The Henry Björklund Tapes, Part Two I first came across a reference to this performance thirteen years ago, in Christopher Hjort’s “Strange Brew – Eric Clapton & the British Blues Boom 1965 – 1970” (Jawbone Press). Under the entry for this date, Hjort writes of audience member Henry Björklund’s recollection of Green opening the show […]
Maxwell Street Jimmy Davis and Peter Green The first time that I came across the name Maxwell Street Jimmy Davis was in 1999; in a conversation with Mike Vernon printed in the booklet to “Fleetwood Mac – The Complete Blue Horizon Sessions 1967 – 1969”, Peter Green mentions him as one of the musicians that […]
In May of 1952, during the sessions for what would be Little Walter’s first release under his own name on Checker Records, he and the band recorded two takes each of both ‘Juke’ and ‘Can’t Hold Out Much Longer’; the latter would be chosen as the B-side. Little Walter and His Night Cats Little Walter: […]
I recently had cause to take another look into Fleetwood Mac’s recording of ‘Need Your Love So Bad’ and the amount of information that is available now, as compared to what I had been able to cobble together when writing my books, (going back more than twenty years ago) is striking. The new information, while […]
Otis Spann w/ FM ‘Ain’t Nobody’s Business’ Otis Spann was born on March 21, 1930 into a musical family (his mother played guitar, his father, piano), in Jackson, Mississippi. His informal schooling on piano began around the age of eight, under the supervision of a local musician named Friday Ford. By fourteen he was playing […]
