The blues is ripe with legends and myths, not least the oft-touted claim that W.C. Handy was the father of the blues. But as Darryl. W. Bullock tells it, there is an important tract of blues history ...

In 2005, fans and scholars of early jazz and blues were handed the keys to a buried treasure chest: an eight-CD set of recordings that New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton had made at the Library of ...

NPR's Scott Detrow talks with Smithsonian curator John Troutman and blues musician Dom Flemons about the new folk music album, Playing for the Man at the Door. DOM FLEMONS: This is a collection that ...

In 1938, jazz/blues pianist and singer Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe—better known as Jelly Roll Morton—sat down behind the grand piano at the Library of Congress’s Coolidge Auditorium. It was at the ...

This isn’t a book for the fainthearted. It’s certainly not for the puritanical. This magnificent, raunchy exploration of early blues lyrics contains references so scabrous they would make a pirate ...

You don’t get the nickname “Lightnin’” for no reason, especially when you’re a blues artist. Born March 15, 1912, in Centerville, Texas, Samuel John “Lightnin’” Hopkins became one of the most ...

NPR's Scott Detrow talks to Smithsonian curator John Troutman and blues musician Dom Flemons about a new folk album, Playing for the Man at the Door, from late chronicler Mack McCormick's collection.

The first thing that you have to accept when you write a book about early blues music, Dr. Gregg Kimball says, is that you’ll never solve the mystery of it all. “We just don’t know,” says the author ...

Along with early Mississippi migrants Muddy Waters, Son House, and Robert Johnson, Willie Dixon was a key figure and an early pioneer in the formation of the Chicago blues sound by the 1940s.

DOM FLEMONS: This is a collection that was just - it was known as The Monster. DETROW: That's blues musician Dom Flemons. FLEMONS: You know, you always hear that for each musician that recorded, there ...