“You got to have a J-O-B if you wanna be with me… No romance without finance.” This is one of the finest funk and soul singles of all time – despite its far-from-feminist materialistic message; it was the ’80s after all. (more…)

Leroy Van Dyke’s first job as a livestock auctioneer inspired the song that brought him to fame back in 1956.

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Lone Justice tackled The Undertones’ greatest song Teenage Kicks when they kicked off the LA cowpunk scene and paved the way for alt-country.

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The best thing about Television Personalities – the DIY punk band, not the narcissists on your telly – is their titles incorporating famous figures. And this song.

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Acoustic bluesman Eric Bibb found fame in his mid-forties and is still making remarkable music on his steel-strong guitar at the age of 73.

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Moving on from yesterday’s Ray Charles post, but not completely… in the early ’50s he went down to New Orleans to work with Guitar Slim, and this was the result.

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Ray Charles is rightly credited with almost single-handedly inventing soul and R&B in the early 1950s. But in the 1960s he surprised his fans, and the whole of the pop world, by turning his hand to country-and-western.

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Ask anyone to name the first female blues guitarist and you’ll probably be told it was Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Or maybe Big Mama Thornton. Memphis Minnie came before both of them.

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I discovered the genius of Robbie Basho late in my musical explorations. He came to (minor) game alongside his fellow finger-pickers John Fahey and Leo Kottke but was forgotten for years after a premature death until a resurgence of interest in ‘American Primitive’ guitarists.

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Barrett Strong had the first hit for Tamla-Motown when he sang the original version of Money (That’s What I Want) in 1959.

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