ARTICLE IV
TRUE BLUES & BEYOND. PART I
SONIC BOOM author, Frank Reddon, riffs on the historical evolution of the blues,
with specific examples from Led Zeppelin's music
WHY ARE "THE BLUES" CALLED THAT, ANYWAY?
The blues have been called a lot of things, from "the Devil's music" to "the most heavenly music on Earth". For such a universally celebrated and performed musical genre, it's astonishing how their true origins remain shrouded in mystery. Even the origin of the name "blues" is open to speculation. Here's just one of many possible explanations.
We've all experienced those days when we feel a bit "bummed out" or "down". Maybe there was a good reason, maybe there wasn't. That general – or specific – feeling of malaise, depression and/or despondency has always been part of the human condition. In Elizabethan England (1558-1603), a name was coined for it: the "Blue Devils".
These blue devils are universal. Everyone experiences them at some time or another. Lost love, dashed hopes, loneliness, lack of purpose, occupational evils, road-weariness – there are many circumstances and scenarios in everyday life that conjure up the blue devils within us! Today, we might call them "Blue Mondays" or, simply, "the blues". But we still identify with those blue devils from Elizabethan times.
Black American history is one of incredible injustice. Certain words and terms have rightfully become socially unacceptable over the past decades. In writing about the blues, there's a delicate balance to maintain between proper historical context and current standards of "political correctness". I have done my best to walk that line. Any missteps are either unintentional or purely in the interest of historical accuracy, for which I seek your understanding in both cases.
All right, then. Let's step into the time machine and go back to basics – and the blues!
Blue Funk. Blue Devils.
Here are some BLUES worth catching!
The Rolling Stones loved 'em. So did The Who. And Jimi Hendrix. Eric Clapton forsook The Yardbirds when they started fusing rock'n'roll into the pure blues he loved so much. And, of course, Led Zeppelin loved the blues and launched their career playing them.
So what exactly are the blues? Where'd they come from? How did Led Zeppelin and so many other bands in the 1960s get interested in the blues? Especially since Zeppelin was in England and the blues were in America. Or were they?
It's pretty amazing, actually, that so little is known about how the blues came to be. As a music genre, they have tremendous universal appeal. They're important, magical, influential – yet totally mysterious.
According to the esteemed ethnomusicologist, James Lincoln Collier, the precise origins (when, how, why, where) of when the blues became, well, widely known as "the blues", is unknown to this day. He feels the best we can say is that the blues developed from variations of American Black folk forms, as a separate form of music. Furthermore, Collier believes the blues are directly descended from work songs that were being created, sung and developed in the 1880s and 1890s in the fields by black slaves in the United States.
Collier says that the term "the blues" has replaced the proper name of "Black American folk music". And what is that? A fusion and hybridization of two distinct music systems: "African" and "European".
There's a common misconception that the blues arose purely from African roots transplanted in America. Collier dispels that idea with compelling historical evidence of a huge European influence.
A "music system" consists of musical traditions, conventions and techniques. The music system of traditional African music was introduced to North America in the 1700s and 1800s, by African slaves. The Europeans (mainly of British origin) who settled in America during the same time period brought their European music system along with them.
The two music systems began to merge and fuse in the United States. This fusion began in the mid to latter 1770s and continued into the 1880s and 1890s. It is vitally important to remember that the Blacks could not ignore white European music, either, which had existed since before the time when the United States became a country in 1776. Still, the enslaved Blacks managed to preserve a vast amount of their African culture in song, over almost three centuries.
In his landmark work, The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History, Collier tells us that by 1910, the traditional black work songs had evolved into a complete music form that was dubbed "the blues". That's not to say they stopped evolving, though. Far from it! He says no one really knows for certain when the blues came about. He states there are no written descriptions resembling the blues in the nineteenth century; a time period some musicologists have suggested the blues came into being, early on.
Collier duly notes that blues music appeared in written form for the very first time in 1912, when sheet music was published for Memphis Blues and Dallas Blues. By 1920, the looser country blues had evolved into the "classic blues", which flourished throughout the 1930s.
During the '30s and '40s, the blues travelled up from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago, and spun off in exquisite new directions. Technological advances, including amplification, in the '50s made the music truly "electrifying". That was when the blues got exported to England via the live performances of artists like Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters. But, as we've already seen, England had influenced the blues' evolution from the very start. Moving ahead in this blues retrospective, it was circa 1968, in London, England that Led Zeppelin began playing and experimenting with the blues. Coincidence? Lovers of Led are sure to think not!
Now let's backtrack a bit and look at these periods in greater detail.
After the blues became what Collier called a "complete" musical form about 1910, there were still some older singers performing it the way they had before that. Many of these men were recorded into the 1920s and '30s. The forms of these earlier, pre-1910 blues were "looser" than the more advanced musical form of the blues that had
developed by 1910. They became known as "country blues" – an intermediary form between the "work song" that all blues arose from and the "classic blues" that began to emerge around 1920.
Such "classic blues" were created and typified by female singers like Ma Rainie and Bessie Smith. The classic blues were yet another outgrowth of the country blues. The classic blues performers kept some of the elements of country blues, but incorporated Vaudeville elements into their songs. Ma Rainie came from a show business family. Like many classic blues artists, she travelled across the United States performing in minstrel shows.
Jimmy Page, Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin and many of their fellow British musicians were keenly interested in the country blues works of Robert Johnson and the classic blues works of singers like Bessie Smith, who was a protégée of Ma Rainie's. Robert Plant often made reference to the influential appeal of Bessie Smith and her work when he was interviewed in the 1970s.
Throughout the 1930s and '40s, the blues continued to evolve. They were being preserved, too. Performers such as Leadbelly kept the tradition of the old work songs and blues songs intact, performing them in the South. Leadbelly spent much of his life in a Louisiana prison. Lucky for us, a musicologist named John A. Lomax recorded Leadbelly's old work songs and black folk songs. Eventually, in the 1940s, Leadbelly played guitar for front man, Blind Lemon Jefferson, who was another inspiration of Led Zeppelin's lead singer, Robert Plant. Leadbelly starting playing in night clubs and, in 1949, he toured Europe, introducing the continent to live blues. And they loved it!
Everything changed in the 1950s. Technological improvements and innovations set the stage for a new kind of blues music to be created and played.
Legendary Chicago Bluesman, Willie Dixon, performs in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1992
Photo courtesy of Bill Nagy, used with permission. Enzepplopedia Archives.
Willie Dixon, one of Led Zeppelin's big inspirations in the early days, is considered "The Father of The Modern Chicago Blues". He arrived in Chicago in 1936 and made a career out of singing the blues. Zeppelin was influenced by songs that Willie Dixon penned, performed or recorded, such as You Shook Me, I Can't Quit You Baby and Whole Lotta Love. Dixon became a superb producer and arranger; he also played bass on several records at Chess Records for many Chicago-blues-style artists in the 1950s. Among them? Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf – two more of Led Zeppelin's early influences.
Muddy Waters used heavily amplified electric guitars to play his blues songs. They added a whole new dimension of sonority to their acoustic guitar beginnings in the Mississippi Delta and elsewhere. The highly amplified electric guitar and bass, drums and piano gave musicians of this era a whole new sound and realm of expression, to convey the blues. People loved this new treatment of both old and new blues songs that made the scene in Chicago, in the 1950s.
Chicago became the place to be for exploring the use of heavily amplified electric guitars, bass and drums, for example. Instruments such as the harmonica were also featured and played by the likes of Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon. The latter, Dixon, also backed up another one of Led Zeppelin's influences: Memphis Minnie. Chicago's Chess Records and Okey Records provided places for these artists to record. They would hone and perfect their craft in Chicago's smoky, boozy blues clubs. And so the Windy City became an important incubation bed for "modern blues".
Fast forward to the 1960s. In England, the younger crowd was keenly interested in the blues. In fact, Muddy Waters blew the English away when he toured there in 1958, with his heavily amplified electric guitar, driven by a throbbing bass guitar, pounding drums and rough, raspy lines of lyrics he sang to deliver soulful blues. The English had never before heard amplified blues like that live, although many blues devotees had been collecting records for years. Among these fervent record collectors who actively traded with collectors in the United States was none other than a young English music lover, named Jimmy Page!
Everyone - from The Beatles and The Rolling Stones to the members of Led Zeppelin – was interested in the blues in some way, shape or form, in the 1960s. As many other blues performers toured Britain in the 1950s and '60s, England awakened and embraced this new amplified sound that grew out of Black American Folk Music, now known as "the blues". Don't forget that, while this amplified version of the blues sounded so new to British ears in the 1960s, English settlers in America had actually helped create modern blues through the process of musical evolution, when both the European and African music systems blended and fused together!
The musical evolution of the blues genre is a vast and complicated one that's well beyond the scope of this month's issue of the Enzepplozine, for sure! However, this brief synopsis should have provided some helpful and interesting reference points for the next time you hear "the blues" mentioned in any musical context.
Now that we've touched on the history of the blues, let's look at examples and influences in Led Zeppelin's music; specifically, the group's first two albums, Led Zeppelin and Led Zeppelin II, both released in 1969.
THE WORK SONG: "BIRTHIN' THE BLUES"
The work song was the first "house of blues"...the primary musical structure that would evolve into what we now recognize as the blues.
When black Africans were brought to the United States as slaves in the 1700s and 1800s, their musical principles and culture naturally came with them. They would sing while toiling in the fields, for diverse reasons. Perhaps it was to make the best of a bad situation or to dissociate themselves from their oppression. The workers enjoyed singing these songs not only in the fields to pass the time, but after a hard day's work, for the sheer pleasure of it. This helped their songs evolve musically, from simple melodic structures based on African traditions to the more complicated structures of work songs.
Work songs were characterized by having a "song leader", out in the fields, working along with everyone else. The song leader would "call" out a vocal line that was usually an improvised melody of two or three notes. The other workers provided a "response", with a tuneful offering of their own.
Frequently the lyrics of the works songs were delivered by song leaders between the cadence of a hammer hammering or an axe chopping, for instance. The work they were doing established the cadence. The song leaders' vocal lines contained more lyrics than the sung "responses" of the other workers. Essentially, the music was being built around the cadence and rhythm of whatever work was being done. How amazing is that, when you think about it? Very, very creative and innovative actually!
In the process, a beautiful musical dialogue was created that continued to evolve over the years. One of the main purposes of the work song with its "call and response"
format was to promote a feeling of unity and common experience among the workers. It was a way of feeling, saying it with music, that "we're all in this together" which was good for morale while working long, hard hours in the fields. Singing helped pass the time and made the drudgery of their toils more bearable.
Another characteristic of work songs is that they had "blue notes" and "blue melodies" in them. Blue notes originated in the old African music system. The European music system consists of major and minor modes.
If you think of a piano keyboard, there are black and white keys for the notes. Blue notes from the African music system would fit in between the two. Their pitches were less exact. That's why, when the African blue notes were played within a European composition, they sounded "wrong, but right". Page's guitar solo in Livin' Lovin Maid from Led Zeppelin II is a fine example of how these blue notes catch your ear off-guard. They sound pleasantly out of place within the framework of a European music system song. As a result, the vocals in blues songs seemed "off-pitch" to ears accustomed to the European music system. Blue notes are rather like blue devils, trying unsuccessfully to possess the soul of the song!
Another important trait of the African music system was the slide from speech into song; for example, when euphoric feelings took over. Slurring of words, or "melisma", was also common and accounted for the blue notes heard in between vocal lines. For a great example of melisma, listen to Robert Plant singing at the end of the verses of You Shook Me. Plant's voice sounds like a razor-edged siren, descending with great power and clarity as he hangs on to the last word of the phrase...falling downward with Page's athletic guitar work.
The blues singers' vocals were often very guttural and raspy, with frequent falsettos employed. Falsetto is a vocal technique that takes the singer's voice higher than its usual vocal range. Robert Plant is a master of falsetto in the blues songs contained on Led Zeppelin. Just as the field workers introduced hollers and shouts, so did he.
How did the European music system influence the evolution of work songs into the blues? For one thing, it introduced into the mix instruments such as trumpets, trombones and pianos. These instruments had been played on plantations at least since the 1840s. In the evening, when the black men weren't working, many of them had access to these brass and string instruments. They also played the banjo, an instrument native to Africa. They would borrow and absorb ideas from the European music system, through the use of these European instruments, in what little leisure time they had.
Work songs weren't necessarily about the work itself, although in many cases, they were. Mostly, the themes dealt with the toils of working for the employer, love gone bad, the triumphs and tragedies of the travelling life. Sexual innuendos were also a mainstay for many of these work songs. It has been suggested that the slaves had so little control over most of their lives that their fantasies and the few things they could control – like their women, families and love lives – became the major themes they explored in singing the blues.
Cross-rhythms were another element of the African music system that melded and fused into the European one to create the blues genre. To understand what a cross-rhythm is, try tapping your foot twice. At the same time, tap your hand three times. You'll get the idea – and it's not easy to do!
CENTRAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE BLUES
There are many characteristics central to the various sub-genres within the larger family of blues. Led Zeppelin and other bands – both British and American – would incorporate them into their own music.
After we discuss some of these traits, we'll put this fascinating slice of blues history to use. We'll see how some of these age-old blues conventions are used in the music on Led Zeppelin's self-titled debut album and Led Zeppelin II, as we discuss them in the categories below.
BLUES SONG FORM
Typical blues songs, whether "old" or "modern" blues, are divided into three equal parts. Each one contains three single lines of lyrics. In many instances, but not always, there is variation in the blues forms. For example, the second line of lyrics may actually repeat the first. And, as was characteristic of the work song from which the blues form descended, the third line of lyrics provided an elaboration on, or completion of, the previous two lines of lyrics that were sung.
Of course, the blues song form has many more defining characteristics, but this is a very important one that pinpoints a central feature for identifying such songs. Listen to the various verses of You Shook Me on Led Zeppelin and you'll appreciate this all-important compositional trait of the framework of a blues song. For other great examples of what we've been discussing, listen to I Can't Quit You Baby and How Many More Times, also from that debut album or The Lemon Song from Led Zeppelin II.
The late JJ Jackson was very proud of how Led Zeppelin preserved the blues tradition and extended the genre into rock'n'roll. Here, Jackson is on stage with Led Zeppelin, preparing to introduce the band at the Carousel Theatre, Framingham, Massachusetts, USA on Thursday, August 21, 1969.
Photo courtesy of JJ Jackson's personal collection, donated to the Enzepplopedia Archives.
AT THE HEART OF THE (SUBJECT) MATTER
Blues music is often paradoxically sad and joyous at the same time. Like the work songs from which all blues arose, the blues material on Led Zeppelin and Led Zeppelin II, draws on common blues themes. Here are a few examples from each of those albums, whose themes are the very essence of the blues.
Love gone wrong:
• You Shook Me, I Can't Quit You Baby, How Many More Times (from Led Zeppelin)
• The Lemon Song (from Led Zeppelin II)
The carefree travellin' life of a hobo and the happy side of the blues:
• Bring it on Home (from Led Zeppelin II)
Magic and mystery (fantasy), thematically appropriate to the bluesy treatment Led Zeppelin gives it:
• What Is and What Should Never Be (from Led Zeppelin II)
MELODIC LINES
Simple melodies, often consisting of two or three notes, are a key identifying feature of the blues. A good example of a rather simple blues melody, over top of the instrumental Led Zeppelin? Robert Plant's singing of the first two lines of the verses of I Can't Quit You Baby. Melody lines like that can be traced back to the blues scales employed in Black American folk music.
VOCAL LINES OF LYRICS, ANSWERED BY A SHORT INSTRUMENTAL FILL
In blues songs, a vocal line is delivered and then answered by a short instrumental response, usually a guitar (acoustic or electric), harmonica, piano, drum or horn. This sets up the "call and response" feature of blues music, based on the African tradition of the work song. The singer may even answer him or herself with a harmonica or guitar "response".
In the case of Led Zeppelin's rendition of Willie Dixon's You Shook Me, Plant provides the lyrics or "call" and Page provides the answering "response" with a lumbering, metallic clangour of a guitar offering, in the authentic style of the blues genre.
VOCAL TIMBRE AND TECHNIQUES
Blues vocals are frequently guttural, raspy and will erupt into a bluster of slurred, acrobatically rising and falling lyrics, that are conveyed with great emotional conviction. We spoke earlier of melisma and falsetto. Lyrics may also be shouted, hollered or, in the case of Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant – screeched, screamed or wailed – to authentic effect.
Narrative or "spoken" qualities can also be present in the delivery of blues lyrics. Blues singers have quite an arsenal of musical weapons at their disposal.
Right from Led Zeppelin's earliest days, Robert Plant has been a master of many of these techniques. Listen to Bring it on Home, from Led Zeppelin II. He sounds like an old Mississippi bluesman with his spoken intonations. Also in the introduction of Bring It On Home, Plant uses the harmonica – an instrument that was pivotal in developing the blues.
Plant's mastery of blues techniques and his ability to create the unexampled sonic effect of a jet taking off with his voice, combine to extend the blues and pioneer rock'n'roll. Combine that with Jimmy Page's unparalleled guitar work, John Paul Jones and John Bonham's talents and Led Zeppelin succeeded in transforming the blues into an electric slurry of sonority never before heard. To think the simple work song had evolved into this!
BOTTLENECK ON ACOUSTIC AND ELECTRIC GUITAR
Legendary bluesmen such as Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters used the "broken" bottleneck technique (also known as slide guitar). It created a raspy, almost "buzzing" sound, that often mimicked the raspy, husky voice of the blues singer.
Robert Johnson used the bottleneck technique on his acoustic guitar. Muddy Waters mastered it on an electric guitar, which meant that much more volume could be generated not only because of amplification, but the natural physics of an electric guitar. The bottleneck technique on an electric guitar creates a more metallic buzzing.
On the recordings of Led Zeppelin and Led Zeppelin II, Jimmy Page exhibits his mastery of the bottleneck technique on electric guitar. For an excellent example, check out You Shook Me, on the debut Led Zeppelin album. Instead of using a broken bottleneck, Page wears a metal, thimble-like apparatus on the fourth finger of his left fret hand, to depress the strings and cause this acrobatic, "buzzy" guitar sound. Listen especially to the end of the verses, to hear Page's adroit playing in the bottleneck style.
As in true blues, Jimmy Page uses the bottleneck – or slide guitar – technique during Led Zeppelin's first-ever public appearance: Gladsaxe Teen Club, Copenhagen, Denmark; September 7, 1968.
The band was billed as both The Yardbirds and The New Yardbirds.
The old bluesmen used a broken bottleneck. Page achieves a similar "buzz" effect with a thimble-like device on his fourth finger. Most likely, he is playing You Shook Me – a staple blues song in Led Zeppelin's early repertoire.
Main photo and inset courtesy of Jørgen Angel, used with permission. www.angel.dk
CALL AND RESPONSE TAKEN TO EXTREMES
The call and response exercise that Led Zeppelin used when performing early material on the first tours of 1968-69 quickly evolved (digressed?) into some of the most over-the-top, improvisational insanity ever to grace a stage. It became the band's trademark for the rest of its career.
In the true spirit of the blues and musical evolution, instead of using the "call and response exercise" in the fields, Zeppelin did it in psychedelic ballrooms, school gymnasia, theatres and arenas. As in the old blues songs, Plant would "call" with his vocals and Page would provide a "response" with his guitar. And through their magical synergy on stage and in the recording studio, Page and Plant would reverse the "call and response exercise" sequence. That has made for some outrageously exciting musical moments, both live and on record for Led Zeppelin! There are also examples of Zeppelin playing live on the First U.S. and Canadian Tour of 1968-69, where all four members of Led Zeppelin get into a four-way, instrumental call and response in certain blues-based numbers!
There are many celebrated call and response exercises not only on the blues songs of the Led Zeppelin album, but also on the LP's folk ballads and rock songs. A superb example of Led Zeppelin stretching, pioneering and infusing a very important blues technique into songs other than in their early blues numbers is the acoustic ballad, Babe I'm Gonna Leave You. Its interesting call and response exercises are reiterated in Dazed and Confused, only that time the dialogue occurs between Plant's voice and Page's bowing of his Telecaster electric guitar! This novel and mind-blowing call and response exercise reached anthemic proportions. Have a listen. Hopefully, you can hear how Led Zeppelin manages to transplant elements of the blues, such as this call and response technique, into other songs that weren't really blues numbers, as such. This is one major way that Led Zeppelin was able to blaze and explore new trails in rock'n'roll.
This favourite call and response exercise of theirs would be used in Led Zeppelin's live performances, as well. It is one of the most important blues characteristics that the group used in its musical evolution.
GUITAR /VOCAL UNISON EPISODES
Sometimes a blues artist will play the guitar and the vocal will flow in unison, or "unite" with the vocal, to make guitar and voice sound as one. Obviously, this oneness consists of two different musical sounds because of varying timbres of guitar and voice. Like many bluesmen, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page use this technique to stunning advantage. Listen to the vocals of You Shook Me in the verses. The guitar/vocal unison episodes that Page and Plant create together are breathtaking.
Like the call and response exercise, the guitar/vocal unison episodes used early and throughout Led Zeppelin's career would become one of the band's most celebrated and enjoyable hallmarks. These guitar/vocal
unision episodes also provided improvisational opportunities that Zeppelin never failed to explore, in the true spirit of the blues.
VOCAL & INSTRUMENTAL IMPROVISATION:
One of the most important structural features of the blues, is its form. It's wide open to improvisational wanderings: vocal and instrumental, in any combination. The call and response exercise we have just examined, is one such vehicle that fits well into the improvisational framework of the blues.
Early on in Led Zeppelin's touring and musical development, all four musicians were so competent that they were only limited by their imaginations when treating the blues material - and their own compositions, too. Led Zeppelin heavily improvised all the band's material; showcasing their "make it up on the spot" talents, so important to the blues, during the blues songs they played live.
Songs like I Can't Quit You Baby, How Many More Times, You Shook Me, Killing Floor [aka The Lemon Song from Led Zeppelin II], were improvised and played differently every night - delighting their audiences and the musicians themselves, who obviously loved seeing what they could come up with by improvising! Led Zeppelin took improvisation to new and unparalleled heights in rock'n'roll. They used blues songs early on to hone the improvising skills that would become such an important part of shaping their career.
BLUE NOTES
We talked about blue notes earlier but here are a few excellent examples of them. Check out Jimmy Page's solo guitar work in What Is and What Should Never Be. And don't miss the killer, opening riff of The Lemon Song with Page meat-grinding it out on lead guitar, in an acidulous attack of the blues.
BLUES BAND INSTRUMENTATION:
In Muddy Waters' day, during the 1950s, the typical instrumentation of blues bands consisted of a lead singer and/or harmonica, piano player, electric guitar, electric bass guitar and drums. Led Zeppelin and a host of other bands followed this general format for contemporary blues bands in the 1960s, eventually evolving into rock'n'roll groups. The main vehicle of their musical expression was the heavily amplified music that artists such as Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters had brought into vogue in Chicago, in the 1950s.
John Paul Jones' electric bass playing and John Bonham's thunderous percussion playing interlocked to build a solid "blues brick wall" that's just as crucial as the efforts of Page and Plant in terms of the blues material performed on Led Zeppelin and Led Zeppelin II. Bonham's "shuffling" rhythms during the guitar solo of I Can't Quit You Baby and Jones' staunch, ever-present bass guitar playing anchored Page and Plant's hijinx during that same song. Their contributions prove the value of these instruments in the musical mix of performing blues songs.
Evidence that "Lead" Zeppelin (sic) and bands with "blues" in their names, such as the Savoy Brown Blues Band, were all the rage on the club scene of the late 1960s
Source: The New York Times, February 1969. Newspaper ad courtesy of Enzepplopedia Archives.
FINAL NOTES
Now that we have a better understanding of the blues, we can see firsthand how Led Zeppelin incorporated elements of the genre into Led Zeppelin and Led Zeppelin II. We've also seen how Led Zeppelin retooled many of the blues conventions that originated from Black American folk music. And amped up the genre of rock'n'roll to a level of electricity never seen before 1968 when the group arrived on the scene. Just as the African and European music systems fused and merged to create the blues, Led Zeppelin's greatest legacy is to have fused the blues with amplified rock'n'roll. As their song says, "Thank You"!
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Collier, James Lincoln. The Making Of Jazz: A Comprehensive History, Dell Publishing Company: New York, New York, 1978.
REFERENCES
• http://www.howlinwolf.com
• http://www.rockhall.com/inductee/howlin-wolf
• http://www.muddywaters.com/bio.html
• http://www.rockhall.com/inductee/muddy-waters
• http://www.rockhall.com/inductee/willie-dixon
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© COPYRIGHT 2008 Frank Reddon. All rights reserved.