Albert
"The Iceman"
Collins
"The Master of the Telecaster"
1932-1993

Style synopsis: Contributor: Mike "Mojo" Sutton - The "Houston Twister's" style was more an all out attack than anything else. His raw intensity combined with an awesome stage presence made him a must see when he came to town. His guitar style is not one easily copied. The "Iceman" utilized non-standard tuning (usually a minor one) and the capo to really confuse budding blues guitarists trying to learn his songs from recordings. The Guitar World of July 1992 and Guitar Legends "Blues Power" in 1994 have super articles covering his specific guitar techniques.

B.B.. King and Lucille

King was paid 35 cents for each 100 pounds of cotton he picked in a youth, and quickly realized other talents. A 24 year old Riley King arrived in Memphis in 1947 from Mississippi, and recorded at Sun from 1950 - 1951. During this time he acquired his nickname "Bee Bee" for "Blues Boy," or"Beale Street Boy."

"We hurried (home) so we would be there when 12:15 came, so we could catch the King Biscuit program." - B.B. King. While in Memphis, King lived with his cousin, Blues great Bukka White who mentored the young Bee Bee. King had not played a professional gig before he came to Memphis, and Sam Phillips was working on on developing King's style.

King was enthralled with Beale Street, which was the Black cultural center of the South. Race relations were better there, with an atmosphere of a constant party, day and night. Beale was a magical place to Bee Bee, where people had dress up clothing, not just the work clothes you'd see in the rural areas.King's first performance on Beale earned him half what he'd earn picking cotton for a week.

In 1947, two White men, Bert Ferguson, and John Pepper turned a radio station with a losing format, into an all Black program, complete with an all Black staff, and entertainers. WDIA was the first in the country to do so. WDIA, "The Mother of all Negro Stations" was born. Many Whites wrote the station in protest, but the owners at 2074 Union Avenue didn't budge.

As one of it's first D.J.'s, King got a job with WDIA radio doing "Bee Bee Jeebies" a live music show from one - two PM daily, where he hustled "Pep-ti-Kon" the cure all patent medicine whose company sponsored the show.

Soon Lucky Strike came on as a National sponsor, and Bee Bee worked with Bobby "Blue" Bland, Rufus Thomas, Johnny Ace, and Pine Top Perkins, Muddy Waters piano player. RPM Record distributor Jules Bihari paired King with Sam Phillips, who cut five of the first singles on the RPM label. "She's Dynamite", a remake of Tampa Red's original work, with Phillips base heavy boogie amplification redefined the popular method of recording all instruments with equal magnification.

As King tells it, the story of how his guitar got her name "Lucille," started with a juke joint brawl over a woman named Lucille. The two men fighting knocked over a kerosene barrel, which burned to provide heat for the roadhouse.

Panic ensued as the fire spread uncontrollably through out the wooden structure, and while fleeing the mayhem, King realized that he'd left his guitar inside the burning structure. As fire consumed the bar, band members were forced to flee out of the front door, since the back door was nailed shut to prevent patrons from sneaking in without paying the cover charge.King almost lost his life in the rescue, and named his guitar after the woman to remind him never again to do something so foolish.

King purports to have fathered well over fifteen children, all to different mothers. While preforming for prisoners, at a penitentiary, King met one of his daughters for the first time, she was an inmate. He is a member of the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.B.B. is spokes person for Memphis' Northwest Airlines. Like Jerry Lee Lewis, B.B. licensed his name to a popular club on Beale Street in Memphis in 1991, and appears there in concert.

*Compiled from memphis.com article

John Coltrane

"My goal is to live the truly religious life, and express it in my music. If you live it, when you play there's no problem because the music is part of the whole thing. To be a musician is really something. It goes very, very deep. My music is the spiritual expression of what I am - my faith, my knowledge, my being."
-- John Coltrane

In light of his brilliance, one is tempted to look for the spark; and, on the trail of such a quest as was John Coltrane's, one is often drawn back toward the source. Many influences may have combined to shape his musical identity, including his mother's thwarted operatic aspirations, his father's untimely death, his grandfather's progressive and impassioned preaching, the tutelage of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, and the plight of the African- American in the middle decades of this century. Ancestral memory might be conjectured to have played its part, while there's no question that a universal mentality led Trane to the music and the philosophies of various cultures. But the distinguishing feature of Trane's legacy is the aspect of his personality that drove him on a constant, torturous, exhaustive search for the "essence" of music. For his role in this crucible, he has been variously criticized, analyzed, lionized, and canonized. In any case, an endeavor of such magnitude could only have been undertaken by a man of extraordinary talent inextricably combined with profound spirituality.

Though John Coltrane was laid to rest on July 21, 1967, in Farmingdale, New York, his spirit remains among us, all over the world, because his spirit inhabits his sound--a sound so astonishingly individual and powerful that it has endured mightily since those club dates in the '50s and '60s when it was reported to have hypnotized audience members who ranged from the uninitiated of jazz to the aficionados; a sound that continues to melt hearts, open minds, and unleash passions, thanks in no small part to a prolific recording career and the number of other artists whose repertoires contain Trane's original compositions as well as their own versions of his sublime reinventions of standards and popular tunes. And the depth of his contribution is matched only by the breadth of his appeal: Trane's work at any given period was a spectrum, containing the deep purple of ballads, the moody indigo of the blues, the sunburst yellow of swing, and the blazing scarlet of cutting-edge experimentation. Indeed there were many Coltranes, but the one Coltrane who reaches out and takes your soul between his hands like a shining saxophone is guaranteed to become greater than the sum of his musical parts.

The mind-bending, soul-rending qualities of John Coltrane's music have their roots in a compelling life story. I recommend that listeners also become readers and explore the five book-length biographies currently in print, each of which shines light from a different direction on Trane's many facets. But be aware that it takes a formidable music scholar to fully explain the technical aspects of his creations, while the emotional impact is highly personal and, more often than not, indescribable.

By Dawn Severson

ia arts and music