Buddy Guy

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• Top 6 Blues Artists of All Time

  Currently #6 · score 0

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• B.B. King

  B.B. King, widely known as "the King of Blues," named his guitar "Lucille" and played variations of it throughout a career spanning more than six decades, and his distinctive vibrato-heavy, single-note guitar soloing style became one of the most widely imitated techniques in blues and rock guitar playing. His 1969 tour opening for The Rolling Stones introduced King to a significantly larger young, predominantly white rock audience, helping bridge blues music to the broader rock audience that had been directly influenced by blues but had often overlooked its original Black American practitioners. King maintained an extraordinarily demanding touring schedule for decades, reportedly playing more than 200 shows a year across much of his career, a level of sustained live performance activity that few musicians in any genre have matched, and his commitment to constant touring became central to his reputation as blues music's most visible ambassador. His combination of technical guitar innovation, an expressive vocal style, and his decades-long role introducing blues music to mainstream and rock audiences made King the single most commercially and culturally significant blues musician of the genre's modern era, and he remains the artist most immediately associated with blues music in broader popular culture.

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• Muddy Waters

  Muddy Waters, born McKinley Morganfield in Mississippi, moved to Chicago in 1943 as part of the Great Migration and is widely credited as the central figure in developing Chicago blues, an amplified, electric-guitar-driven evolution of the acoustic Delta blues style he'd grown up playing in Mississippi. His electrified, amplified sound, developed partly out of necessity to be heard over noisy Chicago club crowds, directly shaped the sonic template that rock and roll would draw from heavily in the following decade, and Waters is frequently cited as one of the most direct musical bridges between Delta blues and the rock music that followed. The Rolling Stones took their band name directly from Waters's 1950 song "Rollin' Stone," and numerous major British Invasion rock bands, including the Stones and Led Zeppelin, have directly credited Waters's recordings as foundational influences on their own sound. Waters's 1977 album Hard Again, produced by guitarist Johnny Winter during a career resurgence late in Waters's life, won a Grammy Award and demonstrated his continued vitality and influence even decades after his most commercially significant recordings, cementing his legacy as blues music's most direct link to the rock genre it helped birth.

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• Robert Johnson

  Robert Johnson recorded only 29 known songs across two recording sessions in 1936 and 1937 before his death in 1938 at just 27, yet that remarkably small recorded output has had an influence on subsequent blues and rock musicians disproportionate to almost any other artist's catalog size in music history. The legend that Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a rural Mississippi crossroads in exchange for his extraordinary guitar ability became one of the most enduring and widely repeated myths in American music, a story that's shaped blues mythology for nearly a century despite having no factual historical basis. His technically advanced guitar playing, combining complex fingerpicking patterns with a driving rhythmic slide technique, was considered so far ahead of his contemporaries that later musicians, including Eric Clapton and Keith Richards, have both described their initial reactions to hearing his recordings as genuinely disorienting given how advanced his technique sounded relative to the era's other blues recordings. Johnson's mysterious death, reportedly from poisoning at 27, made him one of the founding members of music's "27 Club," and his songs "Cross Road Blues" and "Sweet Home Chicago" have become foundational blues standards, covered by countless subsequent artists and cementing Johnson's reputation as one of the most influential musicians in blues history despite his brief recorded career.

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• Howlin' Wolf

  Howlin' Wolf, born Chester Burnett, brought an imposing physical presence — standing 6-foot-6 and weighing nearly 300 pounds — combined with a raw, guttural vocal delivery that made him one of the most physically and vocally intimidating performers in Chicago blues, distinguishing him sharply from the smoother vocal styles of some contemporaries. His recordings for Chess Records throughout the 1950s and '60s, produced alongside labelmate Muddy Waters, established Wolf as one of the two central figures of the Chicago blues sound, and his songs "Smokestack Lightning" and "Spoonful" became foundational blues standards covered extensively by subsequent rock musicians. Wolf's intense, sometimes genuinely frightening stage presence, including crawling on the floor and howling during performances, gave his live shows a theatrical intensity that distinguished him from more restrained blues performers and directly influenced the more dramatically physical stage presence later adopted by numerous rock frontmen. His rivalry with fellow Chess Records artist Muddy Waters, whether genuine competitive tension or partly a marketing narrative promoted by the label, became one of the defining storylines of 1950s and '60s Chicago blues, and Wolf's raw vocal intensity remains one of the most direct influences cited by subsequent hard rock and blues-rock vocalists.

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• Etta James

  Etta James's 1961 recording of "At Last," originally written decades earlier for a different film, became her signature song and one of the most recognizable ballads in American popular music, frequently performed at weddings and other significant life events well beyond blues music's typical audience. Her vocal range and stylistic versatility let her move fluidly between blues, R&B, gospel, jazz, and rock and roll, giving James a genre-crossing catalog broader than many artists more narrowly defined within a single style, and she's often cited as a foundational bridge figure connecting blues to modern R&B and soul. James's decades-long struggles with heroin addiction, which she discussed candidly later in her career, significantly disrupted periods of her recording and touring career during the 1960s and '70s, and her eventual recovery became an important part of her later public persona as she continued performing into her seventies. Her powerful, emotionally raw vocal delivery directly influenced numerous subsequent singers across R&B, soul, and rock, including Christina Aguilera's Grammy-winning portrayal of James in the 2008 biographical film Cadillac Records, and James's combination of vocal power and genre-spanning catalog has made her one of the most significant women in the history of American blues and R&B.

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More in Music

• Naftule's Dream

  Naftule's Dream grew out of the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, a Boston-area group that had already been playing traditional klezmer for 14 years before Newton, Massachusetts-born clarinetist Glenn Dickson and accordionist-songwriter Michael McLaughlin spun off a more adventurous, improvisation-focused outlet from within it. The band released two records on their own, "Search for the Golden Dreydl" in 1997 and "Smash, Clap" in 1998, before going on to record three further albums for composer John Zorn's Tzadik label under its Radical Jewish Culture series, a significant marker of downtown-avant-garde credibility. The Boston Globe praised the group for fusing "klezmer music, Phish-like improvisation, and radical Yiddish poetry," a description that captured how directly the band pushed past traditional acoustic klezmer instrumentation and arrangement. Their combination of their roots in a 14-year-old traditional klezmer orchestra and their three albums on John Zorn's boundary-pushing Tzadik label has made Naftule's Dream one of the most musically adventurous bands in the klezmer revival movement.

• Brave Old World

  Brave Old World formed in 1989 with members drawn from California, Chicago, New York, and Berlin, an unusually international lineup for a klezmer band, originally featuring clarinetist Joel Rubin, drummer Ben Bazyler, multi-instrumentalist Stu Brotman (a former member of 1960s rock band Kaleidoscope and a sideman for Canned Heat), keyboardist Alan Bern, and violinist Michael Alpert. Rubin was later replaced by Kurt Bjorling, musical director of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble since 1984, bringing another deeply credentialed klezmer specialist into the lineup. The Washington Post called Brave Old World "the revival's first supergroup," noting that "every player is a virtuoso," and the band won first prize at the 1992 International Klezmer Festival in Safed, Israel, a significant early validation from within the genre's own community. Their combination of their genuinely international, virtuoso-level lineup and their 1992 Safed festival win has made Brave Old World one of the most artistically respected bands in the klezmer revival.

• Kapelye

  Kapelye was assembled in 1979 when ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik organized a group of musicians to perform at a klezmer lecture at Temple Beth-El in Providence, Rhode Island; the November 18, 1979 debut went well enough that the musicians agreed on the spot to keep performing together as a full-time band. The group took its name from the Yiddish word for "a band" and began actively researching and collecting turn-of-the-century klezmer recordings, drawing several members, including fiddler and vocalist Michael Alpert, from the overlapping Balkan music community. Their 1981 debut album, "Future & Past," mixed traditional Yiddish folk ballads with labor and political anthems and songs pulled directly from Yiddish theater, and the band followed it with "Levine & His Flying Machine" in 1985 and "Chicken" in 1987, before "Old-Time Jewish American Radio" became their most successful release. Their combination of Sapoznik's foundational archival research and their genre-launching 1981 debut album has made Kapelye one of the most historically significant bands in klezmer's modern revival movement.

• Andy Statman

  Andy Statman, born in New York City in 1950, started on banjo and guitar at 12 before switching to mandolin, which he studied briefly under lifelong friend David Grisman, and by 1970 he was playing in the experimental bluegrass group Country Cooking, followed by stints with David Bromberg's band. In 1975, Statman sought out klezmer clarinet legend Dave Tarras and became his protégé; Tarras wrote melodies specifically for him and eventually bequeathed Statman four of his own clarinets, deliberately passing the older master's living klezmer lineage directly to him. His late-1970s album "Jewish Klezmer Music" became a touchstone recording for that decade's klezmer revival, released alongside his mandolin-focused "Flatbush Waltz," and the National Endowment for the Arts later named him a National Heritage Fellow, the nation's highest honor in the traditional arts. His combination of his direct mentorship under Dave Tarras and his rare parallel mastery of klezmer clarinet and bluegrass mandolin has made Statman one of the most historically important figures in klezmer's modern revival.

• Giora Feidman

  Giora Feidman was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires to a family of klezmer musicians spanning his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and by 18 he was already leading clarinetist of the orchestra at Argentina's Teatro Colón before joining the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1957 on the recommendation of conductor Paul Kletzki. He played with the Israel Philharmonic until 1974, then launched a solo career and was crowned "the King of Klezmer" in New York already in the 1970s, well before klezmer's broader American revival movement took hold in subsequent decades. In the early 1990s, Steven Spielberg invited Feidman to record alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman on the score for "Schindler's List," and Feidman's solo clarinet became a defining voice on that soundtrack, which went on to win the Academy Award. His combination of a multi-generational klezmer family lineage and his solo clarinet performance on the Oscar-winning "Schindler's List" score has made Feidman one of the most significant ambassadors for klezmer music worldwide.