John Smith Hurt, better known as Mississippi John Hurt, was an American country blues singer and guitarist.
Robert Leroy Johnson was an American blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter. His landmark recordings in 1936 and 1937 display a combination of singing, guitar skills, and songwriting talent that has influenced later generations of musicians. He is now recognized as a master of the blues, particularly the Delta blues style.
Edward James "Son" House Jr. was an American delta blues singer and guitarist, noted for his highly emotional style of singing and slide guitar playing.
McKinley Morganfield, known professionally as Muddy Waters, was an American blues singer-songwriter and musician who was an important figure in the post-war blues scene, and is often cited as the "father of modern Chicago blues." His style of playing has been described as "raining down Delta beatitude."
Greenwood is a city in and the county seat of Leflore County, Mississippi, located at the eastern edge of the Mississippi Delta, approximately 96 miles north of the state capital, Jackson, Mississippi, and 130 miles south of the riverport of Memphis, Tennessee. It was a center of cotton planter culture in the 19th century.
Lizzie Douglas, known as Memphis Minnie, was a blues guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter whose recording career lasted for over three decades. She recorded around 200 songs, some of the best known being "Bumble Bee", "Nothing in Rambling", and "Me and My Chauffeur Blues".
Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James was an American Delta blues singer, guitarist, pianist and songwriter.
Fred McDowell, known by his stage name Mississippi Fred McDowell, was an American hill country blues singer and guitar player.
Charley Patton, also known as Charlie Patton, was an American Delta blues musician. Considered by many to be the "Father of the Delta Blues", he created an enduring body of American music and inspired most Delta blues musicians. The musicologist Robert Palmer considered him one of the most important American musicians of the twentieth century.
David "Honeyboy" Edwards was a Delta blues guitarist and singer from Mississippi.
Willie Lee Brown was an American blues guitar player and vocalist. He performed and recorded with other notable blues musicians, including Son House and Charlie Patton, and was an influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. Brown is considered one of the pioneering musicians of the Delta blues genre.
Crossroads is a 1986 American coming-of-age musical drama film inspired by the legend of blues musician Robert Johnson. Starring Ralph Macchio, Joe Seneca and Jami Gertz, the film was written by John Fusco and directed by Walter Hill and features an original score featuring Ry Cooder and guitar virtuoso Steve Vai on the soundtrack's guitar, and harmonica by Sonny Terry. Steve Vai also appears in the film as the devil's guitar player in the climactic guitar duel.
Tommy Johnson was an American Delta blues musician who recorded in the late 1920s and was known for his eerie falsetto voice and intricate guitar playing. He was unrelated to the blues musician Robert Johnson.
Lonnie Pitchford was an American blues musician and instrument maker from Lexington, Mississippi, United States. He was notable in that he was one of only a handful of young African American musicians from Mississippi who had learned and was continuing the Delta blues and country blues traditions of the older generations.
Roebuck "Pops" Staples was an American gospel and R&B musician. A "pivotal figure in gospel in the 1960s and 1970s," he was an accomplished songwriter, guitarist and singer. He was the patriarch and member of singing group The Staple Singers, which included his son Pervis and daughters Mavis, Yvonne, and Cleotha.
Ishmon Bracey, sometimes credited as Ishman Bracey, was an American Delta blues singer-guitarist. Alongside his contemporary Tommy Johnson, Bracey was a highly influential bluesman in Jackson, Mississippi, and was one of the area's earliest figures to record blues material. Bracey's recordings included "Trouble Hearted Blues" and "Left Alone Blues", both of which appear on several compilation albums.
The Mount Zion Memorial Fund is a non-profit corporation formed in 1989 and named after the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Morgan City, Mississippi, United States. The fund was organized by Raymond 'Skip' Henderson, a former social worker turned vintage guitar dealer and event promoter, in order to create a legal conduit to get financial support to rural African-American church communities in Mississippi, and to memorialize the contributions of numerous musicians interred in rural cemeteries without grave markers. For work with the Mount Zion Memorial Fund, Henderson received the W.C. Handy Award for historic preservation "Keeping the Blues Alive" in May 1995.
The Search for Robert Johnson is a 1991 UK television documentary film about the Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, hosted by John Hammond, and produced and directed by Chris Hunt. In it, Hammond travels through the American Deep South to pursue topics such as Johnson's birth date, place and parents, his early musical development, performances and travels, romances, his mythic "pact with the devil," his untimely murder in his late twenties, the discovery of possible offspring, and the uncertainty over where Johnson is buried. Throughout, Johnson's music is both foreground and background, from recordings of Johnson and as performed on camera by Hammond, David Honeyboy Edwards, and Johnny Shines.
Houston Stackhouse was an American Delta blues guitarist and singer. He is best known for his association with Robert Nighthawk. He was not especially noted as a guitarist or singer, but Nighthawk showed gratitude to Stackhouse, his guitar teacher, by backing him on a number of recordings in the late 1960s. Apart from a brief tour in Europe, Stackhouse confined his performing to the area around the Mississippi Delta.
