Mildred Bailey |
W C Handy |
Mississippi John Hurt |
Blue Lu Barker |
Sleepy John Estes |
Robert Nighthawk |
J. B. Hutto |
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Back to the Roots of the Blues ... Backtracking
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Latest release 11th July 2025 - Thank you for visiting with us, we cordially invite you to review and download the current production below. 'Backtracking' is a result of our research a journey of discovery that never ends, our love of the Blues and respect for the artists that left us this legacy of music.
All this simply because the music, the history and the culture of the blues never ends. We're honoured and privileged to share the music within the genre of the Blues back in time a hundred years and beyond, a genre so vast and so diverse.
Backtracking is streamed online and is broadcast worldwide. It's free to join the 'Backtracking' time machine - Get the authentic blues on your radio station ..... |
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Featured artist of the week ..... Blind Teddy Darby
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Theodore Roosevelt Darby, better known as Blind Teddy Darby (March 2, 1906 – December 1975), was an American blues singer and guitarist. Theodore was born in Henderson, Kentucky. He moved to St. Louis with his family when he was a child. His mother taught him to play the guitar. He served some time for selling moonshine. In 1926, he lost his eyesight because of glaucoma. It should come as no surprise that blues musicians of the 1920s and ’30s often recorded under more than one name, whether it was to stay one step ahead of the law, to help secure contracts with multiple record labels or just because a name rang a chord or stuck.
Blind Teddy Darby was no exception. He answered to the nicknames Blind Darby, Blind Blues Darby and Teddy Darby; But Teddy’s most amusing professional alias may be that of .... Blind Squire Turner. Teddy was a friend of the blues musician Peetie Wheatstraw. On December 21, 1941, Wheatstraw's 39th birthday, Teddy was invited to go for a drive with Wheatstraw and two others, but Darby's wife objected, and he declined the invitation. Wheatstraw and his two companions were killed when their car struck a standing freight  train.
In the late 1930s, his career came to an abrupt end when he gave up performing following the murder of Tom Webb. He renounced anything associated with the blues and became an ordained minister at the King Solomon Holy House of Prayer in East St Louis. He briefly relented in 1960 when he recorded again for Pete Welding of Testament Records but the recordings from this session were never released.
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Thomas Andrew 'Georgia Tom' Dorsey first gained recognition as a blues pianist in the 1920s and later became known as The father of gospel blues music owing to his development, publishing, and promoting of gospel blues music. His 'Gospel' music was often literally that, but with a flavour of something a little more risqué mixed in. Bearing in mind that risqué then is considered now as anything but, simply 'tame'.
Thomas A. Dorsey was born in 1899 he learned religion from his itinerant black Baptist preacher father and piano from his organ music teacher mother. He came under the influence of local blues pianists when the family moved to Atlanta in 1910. He began his musical career known as Georgia Tom (initially 'Barrelhouse Tom'), playing barrelhouse piano in one of Al Capone’s Chicago speakeasies and leading Ma Rainey’s Jazz band.
Discouraged by his own efforts to publish and sell his songs through the old method of peddled song sheets and dissatisfied with the treatment given to composers of race music, Thomas became the first independent publisher of black Gospel music with the establishment of the Dorsey House of Music in Chicago in 1932. Although he published his own music and others, he included in his establishment, singer Sallie Martin. He wrote the songs and secured the rights to other songs. Sallie then travelled the US performing and selling music sheets to black churches. It is Dorsey’s distinctive style of writing that the majority of church choirs still use today. Indeed, Thomas was the Father of Gospel Blues. |
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Every day we have the blues ..... Review / Download page
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Jazz - Moods in blue |
Basin Street is a section of New Orleans, in Louisiana, which is a thoroughfare running through the Storyville Quarter. The area earned a name in the early days of jazz music as being a hub for jazz, blues singers and bands trying to get recognised and to make a name for themselves.
Louis Armstrong made this song famous two years after it was written, recording the most enduring version on the 4th December, 1928, with the help of his band. It went on to be included on numerous anthologies and greatest hits compilations, we’re featuring Louis’s version, but it was and recorded by many other artists.
The composer of the song was Spencer Williams, a popular music composer of the early jazz / blues days who had a hit with this tune and several others, including the legendary Mahogany Hall Stomp, recorded by the great Satchmo in 1929. While touring Europe in the mid-'20s, he wrote for Josephine Baker and the Follies Bergeres. Spencer was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, five years after his death at age 76 |
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Myths and Legends of the blues ..... Marion Harris.
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HOW TO GET THE BLUES TO A WIDER, WHITE AUDIENCE - As the’ Blues’ developed the problem was many white musicians and singers did not understand the blues. The minstrel shows of the time made fun of African Americans, presenting them as caricatures, which meant that singers who tried to sing as if they were Black were seen as offensive and unacceptable to African American composers, today we would call them offensively racist.
Sheet music had similar problems, as the minstrel show caricature. Sheet music by Black composers was unlikely to be marketed to or purchased by European Americans. So how was the African American songwriters music going to reach that wider, white audience?
There were a few ‘White’ singers who were sought out by African American songwriters because they were able to sing ‘their’ blues. Marion Harris, was on of the earliest pioneer singer. We know little about her, she was attractive, popular, and possibly because of her delta and later Chicago roots could sing the ‘Black’ blues and jazz convincingly. Consequently, she became the first ‘White artist to sing and record African American blues sometime around 1918. |
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