Raw Sugar by Cootie Stark This week’s blog post touched on the social isolation that our Partner Artists are experiencing in the pandemic. On this track from blind acoustic bluesman Cootie Stark you can sink right into the loneliness of the times. Cootie had a way laying things out there real clear and capturing a […]

Rufus McKenzie was born to a sharecropping family in Perry, Georgia, in 1927. As a child he worked in the cotton fields, singing to his mule to pick up the pace. Rufus reflects, “I learned my music through sadness and coming up hard. I had to wear white people’s worn out shoes. I had little […]

Purchase Can’t Turn Me Around HERE! Harmony is serious business where the Dedicated Men of Zion come from. For their eldest member Anthony “Amp” Daniels, it was so serious that every day his mother would call her children inside, turn off the television, and make them sing in harmony, talk in harmony, do everything in […]

MusicMakerRelief · Pat “Mother Blues” Cohen – Grinnin’ In Your Face (A Capella) Pat “Mother Blues” Cohen takes this powerful Son House tune head on. Pat sheds her electric blues skin and brings it back to her roots on this one. A North Carolina native, Pat has lived a hard life and has always used […]

The Blues was born in the South and dispersed wherever people would congregate. Shot houses, railroad depots, local bars, VFW halls and other community gathering places served as the melting pots in which our greatest cultural export was forged. These regular gigs provided daily bread for the artists who played them and are a critical […]