Bman's Blues Report

Carl Martin was part of a rich musical tradition in Appalachia - a tradition that saw blues and ragtime mesh with pop and the styles of white musicians from rural mountain communities... a tradition that defies most conventional images of music from Appalachia... a tradition that produced some of the finest American music that you can find anywhere. Martin was born near Big Stone Gap, Virginia on April 15, 1906. The town recently memorialized his musical contributions with a historical marker. Click here to read more about the memorial and Martin himself. He is said to have been able to play any instrument with strings, and his career spanned several decades playing solo and in bands including the Four Keys, the Tennessee Chocolate Drops, the Wandering Troubadours and Martin, Bogan, and Armstrong. Martin moved to Knoxville, TN with his family when he was twelve. His older brother taught him to play guitar and he soon learned other stringed instruments and began playing regularly aro...

Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong (March 4, 1909 – July 30, 2003) was an African American string band and country blues musician, who played fiddle, mandolin, and guitar and also sang. He was also a notable visual artist and raconteur. William Howard Taft Armstrong was born in Dayton, Tennessee, and grew up in LaFollette, Tennessee. As a young teenager he taught himself to play the fiddle, and joined a band led by Blind Roland Martin and his brother Carl. They toured the United States performing a wide range of music, from work songs and spirituals through popular Tin Pan Alley tunes and foreign language songs. In 1929 he recorded with Sleepy John Estes and Yank Rachell. The following year he recorded in Knoxville for Vocalion Records, with his brother Roland Armstrong and Carl Martin, billed as the Tennessee Chocolate Drops. Adding guitarist Ted Bogan, the band toured as part of a medicine show and backed blues musicians such as Big Bill Broonzy and Memphis Minnie. As Martin, ...

Ted Bogan was one of the greatest musical artists to ever emerge from Spartanburg, SC, or "South Cackalacky," as the natives would describe it. Bogan was something like a growth from a massive tulip bulb, a bloom that for some reason was never allowed to fully open. He performed and recorded beautifully throughout a career that spanned more than half a century, but was mostly known as a member of the string bands variously known as Martin, Bogan & Armstrong or Martin, Bogan & the Armstrongs. The various members played in many other formations, including the New Mississippi Sheiks, over the years, but at the crux of it all was a strange relationship between Bogan and Howard Armstrong that seems to have rivaled the hate-fest of Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. Most important, however, is that Bogan was not just a country bluesman, but a skilled and versatile purveyor of a variety of classic styles who apparently held his own up against no less a genius guitarist than ...