Chicago, Chicago Blues, Chess Records, Dan Aykroyd, Joel Selvin, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Nick Gravenites, Michael Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield, Elvin Bishop, Charlie Musselwhite, Hubert Sumlin, Buddy Guy
Folklorist Alan Lomax is primarily recognized, when at all, by the instrumental role he played in launching the careers of some America’s and the world’s most beloved guitarist-singers. Indeed, it’s difficult to overestimate the role that he and his father, John A. Lomax, played in shaping musical history as they traveled the back roads of the southern…
12:19 pm UTC Feb. 17, 2021
Muddy Waters
Illustration: Brian Gray, USA TODAY Network
As the National Museum of African American Music opens its doors, journalists from the USA TODAY Network explore the stories, places and people who helped make music what it is today in our expansive series, Hallowed Sound.
CLARKSDALE, Miss. Two men one Black, one white arrived at Stovall Plantation on the last day of August 1941.
John Work III, a professor from Nashville’s Fisk University, and musicologist Alan Lomax had set out to capture recordings of the music of the rural South for the Library of Congress.
They were in the blistering heart of the Mississippi Delta that produced Charley Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson, a man who legend says sold his soul to the devil in exchange for guitar virtuosity at a crossroads roughly eight miles to the south.