Blues Progressions

The hinge of the series — the blues comes home to America, to Texas. The Lone Star blues bloodline (T-Bone Walker's "Stormy Monday," Lightnin' Hopkins, Freddie King); ZZ Top as a ferocious blues-rock power trio hiding inside MTV fame ("La Grange" off John Lee Hooker); the Austin scene at Antone's where young players learned from the masters in person. Then the centerpiece: Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble — Number One, the heavy strings, Montreux and Bowie's "Let's Dance," "Texas Flood," his Albert King and Hendrix worship, his hard-won sobriety and "In Step," and the 1990 helicopter crash. Plus the host's own life-changing SRV epiphany — the note that sent him digging backward and, in more ways than one, the reason this show exists
 

The fuse from Episode 1 catches. How a generation of British kids fell for American blues records and handed the music back louder: Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated as the hub; the underground club scene (the Marquee, Eel Pie Island); the race-and-radio reason it took outsiders; the Rolling Stones as a Chess cover band; the Animals and Them; John Mayall's Bluesbreakers as the guitar-hero factory (Clapton, Green, Mick Taylor); the 1966 "Beano" album and the Les-Paul-into-cranked-Marshall tone that defined rock guitar; the Yardbirds pipeline (Clapton → Beck → Page); Cream and the power trio; Peter Green's blues-band Fleetwood Mac; Led Zeppelin's blues bones — and the honest reckoning about credit and payment owed to the Black originators. Ends with the round-trip: the Stones putting Howlin' Wolf on American TV, and Hendrix flown to London.
 

The opener of a brand-new six-part series — with a warm welcome back to the Southern Rock (Southbound)crowd and an open door for newcomers. We define blues rock (the blues plus rock volume, drums, andattitude), then lay the foundation: the 12-bar form and the bent blue note; the Great Migration thatcarried the Delta to Chicago; Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon and Chess Records; LittleWalter electrifying the harmonica; T-Bone Walker making the guitar a lead voice in Texas; and thethree Kings — B.B., Albert, and Freddie — who wrote the complete guitar vocabulary every rock herowould go on to steal. Ends by setting up the great irony: America's overlooked blues, loved andhanded back by British kids — and the full six-episode map.

Fresh on the heels of my series on Southern Rock, I am launching the next series on Blues Rock starting July 17!

A band like Blackberry Smoke or the Marcus King Band walks out to a sold-out room tonight — and you can’t quite name what it is. Southern Rock? Blues-rock? Country? Americana? All of it? The finale brings the whole story home: who carries it now, how it evolved, and how a porch sound went global. 

1980: Capricorn Records goes bankrupt and the press writes the obituary — Southern Rock is dead. They got it completely wrong. It didn’t die; it went underground, and the faithful kept the fire lit in the small rooms. The host was one of them — behind the board for a Jersey cover band. 

The same five Southern Rock songs play on every classic rock station, forever — but somebody chose them, and somebody froze this music inplace. What got frozen along with it — the flags, the myths, the arguments — is the hardest, most honest episode in the series. And the hostdoesn’t dodge any of it, including his own history with the flag. 

Everybody knows “Free Bird” — it’s a punchline now, the thing people yell as a joke. But that song, and a dozen like it, came out of one white-hotfive-year explosion of Southern music. This is the peak: Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker, Charlie Daniels — and the fire that took some of the best ofthem. 

A grieving manager who’d just buried Otis Redding bets a whole record label on a band with two lead guitarists and two drummers. The town isMacon. The label is Capricorn. This is the room where Southern Rock got its name. 

Welcome back! After a long absence, I would like to welcome you back to Blues Progressions. With the help of AI, I am now able to keep up with work and my side projects. This is the first of a six parts series of the Sub-Genre: Southern Rock. As a long time fan I am thrilled to have it's histroy presented to you. Look for a weekly episode throughout this series!