Blues Matters!—The UK’s MOST READ Blues Magazine
Blues Matters! was founded 1999 as a fanzine to give enthusiasts a voice. intended to support and promote the Blues in all forms, and so provide a service to music fans everywhere, of “Blues Without The Blinkers”. Blues Matters! represents every aspect of the Blues with all the seriousness, humour, depth, belief, and enthusiasm it deserves. By doing so, we bring together the music, artists, publications, creators, industry, and fans, who enjoy, and therefore help sustain, the Blues for further generations.
Each issue offers a refreshing blend of information, fact, honesty, and humour. Blues Matters! brings a wide-range of topics to our readers with exciting and diverse content. Our readers are delighted with pages brimming with interviews, previews and reviews of a whole range of Blues and related music; recording artists, albums, singles, EPs, demos, DVDs; festivals, live gigs and events; associated products; books; and other music information.
Blues Matters! has become the UK’s leading Blues magazine. This success is attributed to our many loyal readers that have supported the magazine through rapid growth, and our dedicated team of professionals, staff, writers, contributors, and supporters – all committed to promoting the Blues in the UK and beyond.
Readers appreciate the fact that Blues Matters! is entirely contributed to by independent music fans and not paid/professional journalists influenced by anything more than a genuine desire to find great Blues music.
Blues Matters! is proud to announce that The Blues Foundation, in Memphis, has awarded us the Keeping the Blues Alive (KBA) Award for 2007, in the Print Media category.
This is only the second time a British publication has received the prestigious award, and the first time for a Welsh production. Previous recipients have included major-titles, such as Rolling Stone.
The magazine has seen fairly dramatic changes to every facet of its production over recent years and whilst this award serves as welcome acknowledgment of the magazine’s continuing progress and improvement
T- Bone Walker
Aaron Walker,T-Bone, born in 1910, came by his music naturally, growing up in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, Texas: his mother Movelia picked guitar and sang the blues, his stepfather Marco Washington was an accomplished player on several stringed instruments, and T-Bone grew up surrounded by music, played by his parents and relatives in regular family jam sessions and house parties. The great Blind Lemon Jefferson was a family friend, and T-Bone spent time as Lemon’s “lead boy,” guiding him and helping collect money when Lemon would play for change in saloons and in the street.
He pioneered the electric guitar sound that helped create the blues and thus influenced all popular music that followed.He played one of the first electric guitars in the mid-‘30s, recording with it in 1939. His “T-Bone Blues,” recorded as a member of Les Hite’s Cotton Club Orchestra, and “Stormy Monday” both became blues classics, demonstrating his jazz-based blues style.
His single-string solos influenced blues players like B.B. King and such rockers as Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan.Walker continued to perform through the ‘70s, dying of a stroke in 1975 after suffering ulcer and alcoholism problems most of his life.
These were the first important blues recordings on the electric guitar, and as T-Bone followed them up, later in the ’40s, with dozens of other now-classic sides, he became a huge influence on countless bluesmen after him — and through them, of course, on the development of rock & roll. It was T-Bone who created the role of the blues singer who is also his own electric lead guitarist, and who also defined much of the power of his instrument, with classic licks and techniques that today, fifty years later, are still essential elements of lead guitar vocabulary.
