Bman's Blues Report

Nitro and Slim Beverly Guitar Watkins Bill Perry Wanda Johnson Pop Ferguson Blues Heritage Festival is a living documentary that makes every attempt to promote, preserve and advance the culture of Blues music as an art form in America. The festival gives its audiences an experiential day with the sights, sounds, and smells of authentic Blues music. If you have attended the festival in the past, then you know and understand what Pop Ferguson Blues means when we say experiential. Pop Ferguson Blues believes that you "educate first, then entertain;" so, we present all educational and fun Blues shows.   What is a Pop Ferguson Blues Heritage Festival like?   When you come to a Pop Ferguson Blues Festival, you will feel like you have gone back in time expecting that you will hear and see Ma Rainey or Son House with Mississippi John ...

Music Maker Blues Revue's packed show at Lincoln Center Out Of Doors last Sunday as part of Americana Fest NYC. Beverly "Guitar" Watkins, Ironing Board Sam, Dom Flemons, Albert White, and company rocked the joint and earned a standing ovation!

In the late 1980s, Timothy Duffy, a penniless North Carolina musicology student, set out to document and preserve traditional southern roots and blues music. On his travels from Winston-Salem's drinkhouse music scene, an off-the-grid hotbed of gritty traditional blues, to deep-south family run churches, he found purpose and inspiration from a cast of amazingly talented, pure and unique set of characters (the artists!!). Toot Blues remarkably captures the true essence and talent of the artists from Guitar Gabriel, a 'homeless magic potion selling' blues genius; to Willa Mae Buckner, a snake charming elderly woman taunting delightfully raunchy blues; to Beverly 'Guitar' Watkins, a grandmother who continues to tear up the stage and play a killer electric guitar behind her head; to Bishop Dready Manning and family churning out homebrewed rockabilly-gospel; to Boo Hanks, an 80 year-old bluesman recording an album for the very first time; to blind guitarist, Cootie Sta...

Beverly "Guitar" Watkins (born c. 1940, Atlanta, Georgia) is an American black female blues guitarist. Sandra Pointer-Jones writes, "Beverly Watkins is a pyrotechnic guitar maven whose searing, ballistic attacks on the guitar have become allegorical tales within the blues community." George Varga, reviewing her debut CD, observed that Watkins “sings and plays with enough poise and verve to make musicians half her age or younger consider alternative means of employment.” When Watkins was approximately 12, her family moved to Commerce, Georgia. She began playing music as a schoolchild, and then in high school played bass for a band called Billy West Stone and the Down Beats. In approximately 1959, her junior year of high school, she was introduced to Piano Red, who had a daily radio show on WAOK, and she subsequently joined Piano Red and the Meter-tones, who played in a number of towns in the Atlanta area, and then Atlanta clubs such as the Magnolia Ballroom and th...