A MODERN 78 RPM READER My good friend Josh Rosenthal who heads Tompkins Square Records out of San Francisco, recently published a...

Rhode Island guitarist and singer Duke Robillard, a musician steeped in the blues, has teamed up with Rhode Island’s Soulshot, a band steeped in Jamaican music, to make one of the year’s most interesting, listenable and danceable records, ‘Two Guitars - One Sound’, a mainly instrumental album featuring Andy Bassford and Mark Berney.

A living archive of post-war music of America, from blues to San Francisco psychedelia, and a whole bunch of entertaining tales along the...

Photo: Britt Hallquist Sometimes you hear a sound that changes things for you forever. You had no idea it was coming, and when you heard...

After the show at The Bottom Line, NYC, April 5, 1981 L-R Jimmy Wimpfheimer, Doug James, Al Copley, Ronnie Earl, Danny Motta, John Rossi,...

The first volume of ‘The Island Book of Records - 1959-1968’ filled 390 pages and covered the first ten years of Island Records. Volume 2...

I find it hard to believe that it was 50 years ago that John Broven, the indefatigable English blues scholar, first published his...

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM American Rhythm & Blues In England 1962 – 1966 The Unseen Photographs of Brian Smith ISBN: 978-0-9561439-4-5 . Arts,...

Ron Levy at the window - Porky in the passenger seat. Roomful had owned an interesting assortment of vehicles before I met them,...

For many years Roomful of Blues traveled the country in a converted bookmobile, made by Gerstenslager of Worcester, Ohio. The vehicle...

Wes Dover - Thee Reggaeologist My wife Britt spent the weekend cleaning out the desk in her office. The last year of her working life was...

Chris Blackwell started Island Records in Jamaica in 1959, recording local talent. His first three releases all made the Jamaican charts....

So Richard is gone. Although his breakthrough hits were in 1955 in the USA, strangely his record label Specialty didn’t have a UK outlet...

Guy with Mott the Hoople Guy Stevens. I have so many memories of Guy. As a musically aware teenager in the UK as the first Rock ’n Roll...

My dad was a clockmaker, and the motto that was always engraved on the faces of his clocks was the latin phrase ‘Tempus fugit'.  Time...

My musical awakenings in the UK were rather varied. Like many who spent much of their later life in the blues field,...

(Published in USA Today in July, 2016) Sixty years ago this month Syd Nathan's King Records released a two-sided instrumental record by B...

(First published in USA Today in March 2016) The movie 'Rock Around The Clock ‘ was released sixty years ago this March....