Blind Willie McTell was a Piedmont blues and ragtime singer and guitarist. He played with a fluid, syncopated fingerstyle guitar technique, common among many exponents of Piedmont blues. Unlike his contemporaries, he came to use twelve-string guitars exclusively. McTell was also an adept slide guitarist, unusual among ragtime bluesmen. His vocal style, a smooth and often laid-back tenor, differed greatly from many of the harsher voices of Delta bluesmen such as Charley Patton. McTell performed in various musical styles, including blues, ragtime, religious music and hokum.
Big Bill Broonzy was an American blues singer, songwriter and guitarist. His career began in the 1920s, when he played country blues to mostly African-American audiences. Through the 1930s and 1940s he successfully navigated a transition in style to a more urban blues sound popular with working-class African-American audiences. In the 1950s a return to his traditional folk-blues roots made him one of the leading figures of the emerging American folk music revival and an international star. His long and varied career marks him as one of the key figures in the development of blues music in the 20th century.
John Dawson Winter III was an American singer and guitarist. Winter was known for his high-energy blues rock albums and live performances in the late 1960s and 1970s. He also produced three Grammy Award–winning albums for blues singer and guitarist Muddy Waters. After his time with Waters, Winter recorded several Grammy-nominated blues albums. In 1988, he was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame and in 2003, he was ranked 63rd in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".
Pinkney "Pink" Anderson was an American blues singer and guitarist.
Booker T. Washington "Bukka" White was an American Delta blues guitarist and singer. Bukka is a phonetic spelling of White's first name; he was named after the African-American educator and civil rights activist Booker T. Washington.
Norman Blake is a traditional American stringed instrument artist and songwriter.
Colin Kendall Linden is a Canadian guitarist, songwriter and record producer. Linden plays acoustic and electric guitar, specializing in slide guitar, country blues, and ragtime fingerpicking. He frequently collaborates with country and folk performers. He is a member of Blackie and the Rodeo Kings with Stephen Fearing and Tom Wilson. He has worked with Bruce Cockburn, Lucinda Williams, T-Bone Burnett, Kevin Gordon, Colin James, Emmylou Harris, Leon Redbone, Rita Chiarelli, Chris Thomas King, The Band, Keb' Mo', Charles Esten and Bob Dylan.
Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown was an American singer and multi-instrumentalist from Louisiana known for his work as a blues musician. He spent his career fighting purism by synthesizing traditional blues and country, jazz, Cajun music and R&B. His work also encompasses rock and roll, rock, folk and Texas blues. He was famously a resident of Texas.
Vassar Carlton Clements was an American jazz, swing, and bluegrass fiddler. Clements has been dubbed the Father of Hillbilly Jazz, an improvisational style that blends and borrows from swing, hot jazz, and bluegrass along with roots also in country and other musical traditions.
Lonnie Brooks was an American blues singer and guitarist. The musicologist Robert Palmer, writing in Rolling Stone, stated, "His music is witty, soulful and ferociously energetic, brimming with novel harmonic turnarounds, committed vocals and simply astonishing guitar work." Jon Pareles, a music critic for the New York Times, wrote, "He sings in a rowdy baritone, sliding and rasping in songs that celebrate lust, fulfilled and unfulfilled; his guitar solos are pointed and unhurried, with a tone that slices cleanly across the beat. Wearing a cowboy hat, he looks like the embodiment of a good-time bluesman." Howard Reich, a music critic for the Chicago Tribune, wrote, "...the music that thundered from Brooks' instrument and voice...shook the room. His sound was so huge and delivery so ferocious as to make everything alongside him seem a little smaller."
R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders are an American retro string band playing songs from, and in the style of, the 1920s: old-time music, ragtime, "evergreen" jazz standards, western swing, country blues, Hawaiian, hokum, vaudeville and medicine show tunes. Underground cartoonist Robert Crumb was the band's frontman and album cover artist. Other members of the band include fellow cartoonist Robert Armstrong and filmmaker Terry Zwigoff.
Stefan Grossman is an American acoustic fingerstyle guitarist and singer, music producer and educator, and co-founder of Kicking Mule records. He is known for his instructional videos and Vestapol line of videos and DVDs.
Connie Curtis Crayton, known as Pee Wee Crayton, was an American R&B and blues guitarist and singer.
William "Bill" Moore was an American blues singer and guitarist.
Ernie Hawkins is an American acoustic blues guitar player, singer, songwriter, recording artist, and educator.
Ramon Goose is an English guitarist, singer and producer, known for his work with the West African Blues Project and the hip hop blues band NuBlues, for his mastery of the slide guitar, and for producing albums for American blues artists. As a solo artist he has toured across the world performing concerts and released several albums to critical acclaim.
Little Sammy Davis was an American blues musician based in New York's Hudson Valley. His music career began in the 1940s, but he was not widely known until the mid-1990s, when he began working in radio, singing, performing on tour, and recording studio albums.
"Crosscut Saw", or "Cross Cut Saw Blues" as it was first called, is a dirty blues song "that must have belonged to the general repertoire of the Delta blues". The song was first released in 1941 by Mississippi bluesman Tommy McClennan and has since been interpreted by many blues artists. "Crosscut Saw" became an early R&B chart hit for Albert King, "who made it one of the necessary pieces of modern blues".
Jerron "Blind Boy" Paxton is an American musician from Los Angeles. A vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, Paxton's style draws from blues and jazz music before World War II and was influenced by Fats Waller and "Blind" Lemon Jefferson. According to Will Friedwald in The Wall Street Journal, Paxton is "virtually the only music-maker of his generation — playing guitar, banjo, piano and violin, among other implements — to fully assimilate the blues idiom of the 1920s and '30s, the blues of Bessie Smith and Lonnie Johnson."
"Death Don't Have No Mercy" is a song by the American gospel blues singer-guitarist Blind Gary Davis. It was first recorded on August 24, 1960, for the album Harlem Street Singer (1960), released by Prestige Records' Bluesville label during a career rebirth for Davis in the American folk music revival. The recording was engineered by Rudy Van Gelder at his studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, and produced by Kenneth S. Goldstein, who had pursued Davis in Prestige's effort to capitalize on the revival.
