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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

When this song came on in the latest series of Industry I thought it might be by Tindersticks. But it’s not: it’s the debut single of Canadian duo TR/ST.

(more…)

David Gilmour plays guest guitar on this magnificent version of his own song Comfortably Numb by Ice-T’s thrash metal band Body Count.

(more…)

Joaquin Phoenix’s sad version of this song was one of the many delightful surprises I discovered when I watched Joker: Folie A Deux in an otherwise empty cinema last night.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Sharon Van Etten is one of several artists interpreting Tom Petty on the soundtrack of Bad Monkey, based on Carl Hiaasen’s 2013 novel.

(more…)

This is so heartbreakingly sad. Nell Smith, the teenage girl from Leeds who recorded a stunning album of Nick Cave cover versions with Flaming Lips, has died at the age of 17.

(more…)

Here’s a funny thing: when I half-heard this on the radio the other day my mind told me I was listening to Tim Buckley. I think it’s the emotional pull of the music and the sorrowful sound of its melancholy melody that did it.

(more…)