Bman's Blues Report

b. 22 January 1927, Florence, South Carolina, USA. It was after moving to Philadelphia in the early 40s that Quattlebaum took up the guitar seriously, and toured with a number of gospel groups, claiming to have recorded with the Bells Of Joy in Texas. In 1952, he recorded solo as a blues singer for local label Gotham. By 1961, he was accompanying the Ward Singers but, when discovered by a researcher, was playing blues and popular tunes through the PA of his ice-cream van, hence the title of his album. Softee Man Blues showed him to be a forceful singer, influenced as a guitarist by Blind Boy Fuller, and with an eclectic repertoire largely derived from records. Quattlebaum made some appearances on the folk circuit, but soon returned to Philadelphia, where he recorded a single in the late 60s. He is thought to have entered the ministry soon afterwards.   If you support live Blues acts, up and coming Blues talents and want to learn more about Blues news and Fathers of the Blues...

The Dixie Hummingbirds are an influential American gospel music group, spanning more than 80 years from the jubilee quartet style of the 1920s, through the "hard gospel" quartet style of Gospel's golden age in the 1940s and 1950s, to the eclectic pop-tinged songs of today. Formed in 1928 in Greenville, South Carolina, by James B. Davis and his classmates, they sang in local churches until they finished school, then started touring throughout the South. Lead singer Ira Tucker joined the group in 1938 at age 13, and they signed with Decca Records. In addition to his formidable vocal skills, Tucker introduced the energetic showmanship - running through the aisles, jumping off stage, falling to his knees in prayer - copied by many quartets that followed. Tucker also took the lead in the stylistic innovations adopted by the group, combining gospel shouting and subtle melismas with the syncopated delivery made popular by The Golden Gate Quartet, as well as adventuresome harmon...

Leroy Kirkland, (February 10, 1906 – April 6, 1988) was an arranger, bandleader, guitarist and songwriter whose career spanned the eras of big band jazz, R&B, rock 'n' roll and soul. Kirkland played guitar in southern jazz bands in the 1920s, and during the 1930s he worked as arranger and songwriter for Erskine Hawkins. He joined Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey in the 1940s and later in that decade began arranging music at Savoy Records in New York. He continued to arrange R&B artists for OKeh Records, Mercury Records and other companies. Some of Kirklands more successful collaborations were with Screamin' Jay Hawkins ("I Put A Spell On You, "Little Demon","Yellow Coat", etc.), Big Maybelle (Kirkland co-wrote her biggest hit, "Gabbin' Blues"). In 1956, Kirkland and his session band teamed up with 14-year-old singer Barbie Gaye to record an R&B song, "My Boy Lollipop" Kirkland's arrangement of the song resulted in a so...

Lloyd Smith was born in Spartanburg, S.C., and moved to the area as a teenager with his family. He joined the WHAT staff in 1955 and worked as a disc jockey until last September when he suffered a stroke. He played jazz, blues, rock, instrumentals and other music, sang and filled his broadcasts with humor. His most recent program was broadcast from 2 to 6 a.m. "He was always very uplifting," said Leslie Rainear, an administrative assistant at WHAT. "He really cared about other people. He always said prayers do work and he would always pray for everybody." He received his nickname, "Fatman," because he carried 290 pounds on his 6-foot-1 frame when he performed in nightclubs in the 1950s. "He used his weight as part of his comedy act on the radio and the stage," said McPherson. ''He later thinned down, but the name stuck." He was also known as "the sheriff," because he wore cowboy boots, a holster, fringed jackets, a badg...

James “Guitar Slim” Stephens was born on March 10, 1915, near Spartanburg, South Carolina. He began to play the pump organ at the age of 5, and two years later he switched to piano. Slim was so small that his feet would not even reach the organ pedals, so he has one of his brothers do the pumping while he practiced the keys. In his early teens he joined the John Henry Davis Medicine Show. He soon picked up the guitar an instrument, which he truly mastered. It was his welcoming spirit that opened the doors of the Carolina blues, a world rarely seen by an outsider to Tim Duffy.  If you support live Blues acts, up and coming Blues talents and want to learn more about Blues news and Fathers of the Blues, -  ”LIKE” ---Bman’s Blues Report--- Facebook Page! I’m looking for great talent and trying to grow the audience for your favorite band!

William McLeish Smith (November 25, 1910 – March 7, 1967) was one of the major alto saxophone players of the swing era. He also played clarinet and sang. He is generally referred to as Willie Smith. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, but raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Smith's first instrument was clarinet and his education was in chemistry. He received his chemistry degree from Fisk University. Nevertheless in 1929 he became an alto saxophonist for Jimmie Lunceford's band. He would be one of the main stars in Lunceford's group and in 1940 had his own quintet as a side project. His success with Lunceford had lost its charms by 1942 as he now wanted more pay and less travel. He then switched to Harry James's orchestra, where he made more money, and stayed with him for seven years. After that he later worked with Duke Ellington and Billy May. He was also part of the Gene Krupa Trio, and can be heard on the 1952 live Verve album The Drum Battle - part of the Jazz at the Philha...

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, ...

Julian Dash (9 April 1916–25 February 1974) was an American swing music jazz tenor saxophonist born in Charleston, South Carolina, probably better known for his work with Erskine Hawkins and Buck Clayton. Julian Dash was a member of the Bama State Collegians, which later became the Erskine Hawkins orchestra. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Julian Dash recorded for Sittin' In With records and later was on the Vee Jay label with his sextets. His renditions of "Devil's Lament" and "Dance of the Mother Bird" on Sittin' In With and his "Zig Zag" on the Vee Jay label were hits in the Black community. Julian Dash can be heard at his best on the 1953 Buck Clayton Jam Session Columbia LPs, a 2-album session, one featuring an appearance by Woody Herman, among other leading jazz musicians. Julian Dash's tenor sax sound was Hawkins-like, but with less rough edges than Hawk's.   If you support live Blues acts, up and coming Blues talents ...

Toy Talmadge Caldwell Jr. (November 13, 1947 - February 25, 1993) was the lead guitarist, main songwriter and a founding member of the 1970s Southern Rock group The Marshall Tucker Band. He was a member of the band from its formation to 1983. Caldwell was born November 13, 1947 in Spartanburg, South Carolina, to Mr. and Mrs. Toy Talmadge Caldwell Sr. He began playing guitar before his teen years with his younger brother Tommy Caldwell. He developed a unique style of playing, playing the electric guitar using his thumb rather than a pick. Toy played basketball and football in high school with friends George McCorkle, Jerry Eubanks, and Doug Gray. While very involved in sports, the boys eventually became interested in music including jazz and blues. By age sixteen, Toy was passionate about music, sports, and his other obsession, motorcycles. He also enjoyed hunting and fishing. Caldwell decided to serve his country and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. In 1966, he reported for ...

"Once again Leroy Kirkland was in charge of the session" begins many an account of R&B and vocal group recording activity from the '40s well into the '60s, almost as many as there are jokes that begin "A man walked into a bar...." While in the latter case subsequent happenings are wildly unpredictable, a typical Kirkland summation will proceed reliably through certain steps, with an outcome guaranteed to be pleasing. A guitarist whose most illustrious training grounds were the Jimmie Lunceford and Cootie Williams big bands, Kirkland idolized jazz guitarist Tiny Grimes. Solos in the Grimes style were something he really never stopped tossing into songs as if adding a throw rug to a room. Kirkland developed into a force beyond the guitar fretboard, however, leading his own groups and serving as a combination director, conductor, and arranger. Before the man who walked into the bar had even ordered a drink, Kirkland would have decided on a configuration -- ...

James "Guitar Slim" Stephens (d.1989) was born on March 10, 1915, near Spartanburg, South Carolina. He began playing pump organ when he was only five years old, singing spirituals he learned from his parents and reels he heard from his older brother pick on the banjo. Slim was so small that his feet would not even reach the organ pedals, so he had one of his brothers do the pumping while he practiced the keys. Within a few years, Slim was playing piano. When he was thirteen, he began picking guitar, playing songs he heard at local "fling-dings," house parties, and churches. A few years later he joined the John Henry Davis Medicine Show, playing music to draw crowds to hear the show master's pitch; this took him throughout the southeastern Piedmont. It seems as if traveling was in Slim's blood from that point on; for in the next twenty or so years, he moved throughout the eastern United States living in such cities as Richmond, Durham, Louisville, Nashvill...

Clara Smith (c. 1894 – February 2, 1935) was an American classic female blues singer. She was billed as the "Queen of the Moaners", although Smith actually had a lighter and sweeter voice than her contemporaries and main competitors Smith was born in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. In her youth she worked on African American theater circuits and tent shows. By the late 1910s she was appearing as a headliner at the Lyric Theater in New Orleans, Louisiana and on the T.O.B.A. circuit. In 1923 she settled in New York, appearing at cabarets and speakeasies there; that same year she made the first of her commercially successful series of gramophone recordings for Columbia Records, for whom she would continue recording through to 1932. She cut 122 songs often with the backing of top musicians (especially after 1925) including Louis Armstrong, Charlie Green, Joe Smith, Freddy Jenkins, Fletcher Henderson and James P. Johnson (in 1929). Plus she recorded two vocal duets with Be...

James "Blood" Ulmer (born February 2, 1942) is an American jazz, free funk and blues guitarist and singer. Ulmer plays a semi-acoustic guitar. His distinctive guitar sound on the semi-acoustic guitar has been described as "jagged" and "stinging." Ulmer's singing has been called "raggedly soulful." Ulmer was born in St. Matthews, South Carolina. He began his career playing with various soul jazz ensembles, first in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from 1959-1964, and then in the Columbus, Ohio region, from 1964-1967. He first recorded with organist John Patton in 1969. After moving to New York in 1971, Ulmer played with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Joe Henderson, Paul Bley, Rashied Ali and Larry Young. In the early 1970s, Ulmer joined Ornette Coleman; he was the first electric guitarist to record and tour extensively with Coleman. He has credited Coleman as a major influence, and Coleman's strong reliance on electric guitar in his fusion...

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 ...

John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie (pron.: /ɡɨˈlɛspi/; October 21, 1917 – January 6, 1993) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer and occasional singer. Allmusic's Scott Yanow wrote, "Dizzy Gillespie's contributions to jazz were huge. One of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time , Gillespie was such a complex player that his contemporaries ended up copying Miles Davis and Fats Navarro instead, and it was not until Jon Faddis's emergence in the 1970s that Dizzy's style was successfully recreated . . . Arguably Gillespie is remembered, by both critics and fans alike, as one of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time." Gillespie was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser, building on the virtuoso style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of harmonic complexity previously unknown in jazz. His beret and horn-rimmed spectacles, his scat singing, his bent horn, pouched cheeks and his light-hearted personality were essential in popularizing bebop. ...

Clyde Wilson - Steve Mancha On Christmas Day 1945 in Walhall, South Carolina a musical legend was born. Clyde Darnell Wilson, or as all collectors and lovers of Detroit soul music know him ... Steve Mancha. Clyde moved to Detroit at the age of five years old and by 1960 he was already singing locally around the Detroit area when he met another future Detroit icon, Melvin Davis. Melvin Davis was already recording for Jack and Devora Brown's Fortune Records. Around this early time Clyde joined Melvin Davis, David Ruffin and Tony Newton in forming a group called The Jaywalkers. Any info on this group and any records that exist would be gratefully received by Hitsville. Shortly after this Clyde met and became friends with Wilburt Jackson. It was with Wilbur that Clyde formed the duo The Two Friends. They were about to record their first 45 for Harvey Fuqua's HPC label. Join us now as we explore the work of one Detroit's Northern Soul musical heroes ... Mr. STEVE MANCHA Th...

Tom Delaney was one of the more popular and prolific composers of blues songs in the '20s. He was better known for the behind the scenes activity of composing, although he did make a few appearances interpreting his own songs on record. Much Delaney material was fodder for recording artists and publishers of this era, always on the lookout for new blues material at a time when the large audience for such product had just recently been recognized. Delaney's "Down Home Blues" was a fantastic success for Ethel Waters in 1924, while the Helen Gross recording of "I Wanna Jazz Some More" became famous for his rhymes about "Miss Susan Green from New Orleans." "Sinful Blues", first published in 1923, was an example of one of the many Delaney titles that fell into control of producer, publisher and record company manager Joe Davis. Davis continued exploiting Delaney material throughout the decade, examples of which include Maggie Jones recording t...

Henry Johnson (* 8th December, 1908 in the union county (South Carolina); † February, 1974 in union (South Carolina)) was an US-American Bluesmusiker (guitar, oral accordion, piano, song). Johnson learned early guitar; in 1933 he also turned to the piano. In the 1970s he was discovered by Pete Lowry, played in several albums and appeared as national, possibly with "Peg Leg Sam" Jackson as well as with Willie Moore and Guitar Shorty If you support live Blues acts, up and coming Blues talents and want to learn more about Blues news and Fathers of the Blues, -  ”LIKE” ---Bman’s Blues Report--- Facebook Page! I’m looking for great talent and trying to grow the audience for your favorite band!

Johnny Mars (born December 7, 1942) is an American electric blues harmonica player, singer, and songwriter. Over a long career, Mars has worked with Magic Sam, Earl Hooker, B.B. King, Jesse Fuller, Spencer Davis, Ian Gillan, Do-Re-Mi, Bananarama and Michael Roach. Mars was born in Laurens, South Carolina, United States to sharecropping parents. His family regularly moved house when Mars was a youngster, but at the age of nine, he was presented with his first harmonica. When he was aged fourteen, and on the death of his mother, Mars and his younger siblings moved to New Paltz, New York, and having left high school, Mars began playing in various clubs in New York. He signed a recording contract with Mercury Records whilst a member of a band named Burning Bush, and they recorded several sides with the label. By the mid 1960s, Mars had moved to California and formed the Johnny Mars Band, who found work but no recognition beyond their North California base. However, they toured with Mag...

Etta Jones (November 25, 1928 - October 16, 2001) was an American jazz singer. She is not to be confused with the more popular singer Etta James nor her namesake, a member of the Dandridge Sisters, who recorded with Jimmy Lunceford and was Gerald Wilson's first wife. Her best known recordings were "Don't Go To Strangers" and "Save Your Love For Me". Jones variously worked with Buddy Johnson, Oliver Nelson, Earl Hines, Barney Bigard, Kenny Burrell, Milt Jackson, Cedar Walton, and the saxophonist Houston Person Jones was born in Aiken, South Carolina, United States, and raised in Harlem. Still in her teens, Jones joined Buddy Johnson's band for a nationwide tour although she was not featured on record. Her first recordings—"Salty Papa Blues", "Evil Gal Blues", "Blow Top Blues", and "Long, Long Journey"—were produced by Leonard Feather in 1944, placing her in the company of clarinetist Barney Bigard and tenor saxop...