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Harmonica Shah
Seward Daward Shah, known as Harmonica Shah (born March 31, 1946) is an American Detroit blues, Detroit and electric blues harmonica, harmonicist and singer. His playing was influenced by Junior Wells, Jimmy Reed, Little Walter, Lazy Lester, and Little Sonny. Biography Born Thaddeus Louis Hall, in Oakland, California, Oakland, California, Shah also spent time in Somerville, Texas, with his blues harmonica and guitar playing grandfather, Sam Dawson. Dawson had recorded for both Alan Lomax and Duke Records. His mother, a Cosmetology, beautician, encouraged him to be a salesman for ''Jet (magazine), Jet'' magazine in the latter part of the 1950s. This allowed Shah access to Oakland's bars and nightclub, clubs, where he heard musicians such as Lowell Fulson, Jimmy McCracklin, Juke Boy Bonner and Big Mama Thornton. Shah told ''Living Blues'' magazine that his grandfather's passion for the blues inspired him. "Well see I picked it up from him, he'd be out in the fields singin' all th ...
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Oakland, California
Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, California, Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the most populous city in the East Bay, the third most populous city in the Bay Area, and the eighth most populous city in California. It serves as the Bay Area's trade center: the Port of Oakland is the busiest port in Northern California, and the fifth- or sixth-busiest in the United States. A charter city, Oakland was municipal corporation, incorporated on May 4, 1852, in the wake of the state's increasing population due to the California gold rush. Oakland's territory covers what was once a mosaic of California coastal prairie, California coastal terrace prairie, oak woodland, and north coastal scrub. In the late 18th century, it became part of a large ''rancho'' grant in the c ...
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Jet (magazine)
''Jet'' is an American weekly digital magazine focusing on news, culture, and entertainment related to the African-American community. Founded in print by John H. Johnson in November 1951 in Chicago, Illinois, the magazine was billed as "The Weekly Negro News Magazine". As publisher, the Johnson Publishing Company created ''Jet'' magazine to offer Black Americans proper representation, noting under-representation of African Americans in the general media. ''Jet'' chronicled the civil rights movement from its earliest years, including the murder of Emmett Till, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the activities of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. ''Jet'' was printed from November 1, 1951, in digest-sized format in all or mostly black-and-white until its December 27, 1999, issue. In 2009, ''Jet'' expanded one of the weekly issues to a double issue published once each month. Johnson Publishing Company struggled with the same loss of circulation and advertising as other maga ...
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Willie D
William James Dennis (born November 1, 1966) is an American rapper from Houston, Texas. He emerged as a member of the hip hop group Geto Boys, which he formed in 1986 alongside fellow Houston rappers Bushwick Bill and Scarface. He signed with the regionally-based label Rap-A-Lot Records to release his albums ''Controversy'' (1989) and '' I'm Goin' Out Lika Soldier'' (1992), the latter of which entered the ''Billboard'' 200. As an online broadcaster, he has been outspoken on political and social issues in Houston. His YouTube channel, created in 2011, has gained one million subscribers as of 2024. Early life Willie took up boxing at the age of 11. In 1985, he became the Golden Gloves Champion for the State of Texas. Rather than become a professional boxer, he decided to become a rap music MC. He attended Forest Brook High School but in 1984, two months prior to his scheduled graduation, he was expelled for fighting. He never returned to school. Career His reputation ...
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The Butler Twins
The Butler Twins were an American Detroit blues and electric blues duo of the twin brothers Clarence (January 21, 1942 – December 22, 2003) and Curtis Butler (January 21, 1942 – April 9, 2004). Longtime semiprofessional performers in the local blues scene in Detroit, they gained international recognition following the recording of three albums in the late 1990s. Their best-known track was "The Butler's Boogie". Biography Clarence and Curtis Butler were born seconds apart, in Killen, and grew up in nearby Florence, Alabama. Their father, Willie "Butch" Butler, was noteworthy as a local guitar player, and with his harmonica playing partner, Raymond Edwards, both proved useful tutors. By the age of seven the twins were proficient enough musicians to win a talent contest, and played in the abandoned house where W. C. Handy once lived. They were in the middle of a family of sixteen siblings, and the twins put together their first musical ensemble at the age of 14, and two years ...
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Eddie Kirkland
Eddie Kirkland (August 16, 1923 – February 27, 2011) was an American electric blues guitarist, harmonicist, singer, and songwriter. Kirkland, known as the "Gypsy of the Blues" for his rigorous touring schedules, played and toured with John Lee Hooker from 1949 to 1962. After his period of working in tandem with Hooker he pursued a successful solo career, recording for RPM Records, Fortune Records, Volt Records, and King Records, sometimes under the stage name Eddie Kirk. Kirkland continued to tour, write and record albums until his death in February 2011. His last performance, the night before his death, was at Dunedin Brewery, Florida. Biography Kirkland was born in Kingston, Jamaica to a mother, aged 11 (Kirkland was raised believing his mother was his sister and he was in his early twenties when the truth was revealed to him by his mother), and first heard the blues from "field hollers", and raised in Dothan, Alabama until 1935, when he stowed away in the Sugar Girls M ...
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Bobo Jenkins
Bobo Jenkins (January 7, 1916 – August 14, 1984) was an American Detroit blues and electric blues guitarist, singer and songwriter. He also built and set up his own recording studio and record label in Detroit. Jenkins is best known for his recordings of "Democrat Blues" and "Tell Me Where You Stayed Last Night". Biography He was born John Pickens Jenkins in Forkland, Alabama. His father, a sharecropper, died when John was not yet one year old, and the boy grew up with his mother and uncle. He left home before the age of 12, and arrived in Memphis, Tennessee. He had a wife at the age of 14, the first of ten marriages. Jenkins took casual work in the Mississippi Delta for several years and then enrolled in the United States Army. Following his 1944 military discharge, he relocated to Detroit, working for Packard and managing a garage, before spending twenty-seven years working for Chrysler. In the late 1940s Jenkins learned to play the guitar and started writing songs. He wro ...
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Jam Session
A jam session is a relatively informal musical event, process, or activity where musicians, typically instrumentalists, play improvised solos and vamp over tunes, drones, songs, and chord progressions. To "jam" is to improvise music without extensive preparation or predefined arrangements. Original jam sessions, also called "free flow sessions," are often used by musicians to develop new material (music) and find suitable arrangements. Both styles can be used simply as a social gathering and communal practice session. Jam sessions may be based upon existing songs or forms, may be loosely based on an agreed chord progression or chart suggested by one participant, or may be wholly improvisational. Jam sessions can range from very loose gatherings of amateurs to evenings where a jam session coordinator or host acts as a " gatekeeper" so that appropriate-level performers take the stage to sophisticated improvised recording sessions by professionals which are intended to be bro ...
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Taxicab
A taxi, also known as a taxicab or simply a cab, is a type of vehicle for hire with a Driving, driver, used by a single passenger or small group of passengers, often for a non-shared ride. A taxicab conveys passengers between locations of their choice. This differs from public transport where the pick-up and drop-off locations are decided by the service provider, not by the customers, although demand responsive transport and share taxis provide a hybrid bus/taxi mode. There are four distinct forms of taxicab, which can be identified by slightly differing terms in different countries: * Hackney carriages, also known as public hire, hailed or street taxis, licensed for hailing throughout communities * Private hire vehicles, also known as minicabs or private hire taxis, licensed for pre-booking only * Taxibuses, also come in many variations throughout the Developing country, developing countries as Share taxi#United States, jitneys or jeepney, operating on pre-set routes typified ...
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Ford Motor Company
Ford Motor Company (commonly known as Ford) is an American multinational corporation, multinational automobile manufacturer headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan, United States. It was founded by Henry Ford and incorporated on June 16, 1903. The company sells automobiles and commercial vehicles under the List of Ford vehicles, Ford brand, and luxury cars under its Lincoln Motor Company, Lincoln brand. The company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the single-letter ticker symbol F and is controlled by the Ford family (Michigan), Ford family. They have minority ownership but a plurality of the voting power. Ford introduced methods for large-scale manufacturing of cars and large-scale management of an industrial workforce using elaborately engineered manufacturing sequences typified by moving assembly lines. By 1914, these methods were known around the world as Fordism. Ford's former British subsidiaries Jaguar Cars, Jaguar and Land Rover, acquired in 1989 and 2000, r ...
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Living Blues
''Living Blues: The Magazine of the African American Blues Tradition'' is a bi-monthly magazine focused on blues music, and America's oldest blues periodical. The magazine was founded as a quarterly in Chicago in 1970 by Jim O'Neal and Amy van Singel as editors, and five others as writers. Among them were Bruce Iglauer and Paul Garon. They sold the first copies at the 1970 Ann Arbor Blues Festival. In 1983, O'Neal and van Singel sold publication rights to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, and donated to the center their collection of blues records, photos, subject files, and memorabilia. At that time the magazine became a bi-monthly, with O'Neal still the editor. Peter Lee, who later founded Fat Possum Records, David Nelson, and Scott Barretta followed as editors. The headquarters of the magazine moved to Oxford, Mississippi Oxford is the List of municipalities in Mississippi, 14th most populous city in Mississippi, United Sta ...
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Big Mama Thornton
Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton (December 11, 1926 – July 25, 1984), was an American singer and songwriter of blues and R&B. The ''Encyclopedia of Pop, Rock and Soul'' described Thornton by saying: "Her booming voice, sometimes 200-pound frame, and exuberant stage manner had audiences stomping their feet and shouting encouragement in R&B theaters from coast to coast from the early 1950s on". Thornton was the first to record Leiber and Stoller's " Hound Dog", in 1952, which was written for her. It became Thornton's biggest hit, selling over 500,000 copies and staying seven weeks at number one on the ''Billboard'' R&B chart in 1953. According to New York University music professor Maureen Mahon, "the song is seen as an important beginning of rock-and-roll, especially in its use of the guitar as the key instrument". Thornton's other recordings include her song " Ball and Chain", made famous in the late 1960s by Janis Joplin. Though later recordings of her songs by other artis ...
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Juke Boy Bonner
Weldon H. Philip Bonner, better known as Juke Boy Bonner (March 22, 1932 – June 29, 1978) was an American blues singer, harmonica player, and guitarist. He was influenced by Lightnin' Hopkins, Jimmy Reed, and Slim Harpo. He accompanied himself on guitar, harmonica, and drums in songs such as "Going Back to the Country", "Life Is a Nightmare", and "Struggle Here in Houston". Career Born in Bellville, Texas, Bonner was one of nine children; his parents died when he was very young. Raised by a neighbor's family, he moved in with his older sister in 1945. At the age of twelve he taught himself to play the guitar. He gained the nickname "Juke Boy" as a youth, because he frequently sang in local juke joints. Starting a musical career as a teenager, he won the first prize at local disc jockey Trummie Cain's weekly talent show at the Lincoln Theater in Houston, Texas in 1948. Through this he secured a 15-minute radio slot on a show operated by the record retailer Henry Atlas. After h ...
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