Delta

James “Super Chikan” Johnson was born in the small Delta community of Darling in 1951 and grew up in rural towns around the area. As a young boy living in the country, he developed an interest in his family’s chickens and spent time trying to understand the meaning of the noises they made. His friends […]

Guitarist and vocalist “Big” Jack Johnson was born in Lambert, Mississippi, in 1940. He was inspired to play music by his father, Ellis Johnson, a fiddler, banjoist, and guitarist who played blues, breakdowns, and country music. Johnson, a lifelong fan of country music, began playing guitar with his father at age thirteen, and later mastered

Bassist, vocalist, and bandleader Wesley Jefferson has been a stalwart of the Clarksdale blues scene since the mid-1960s. He was born in Roundaway in Coahoma County on March 23, 1944, the oldest boy of thirteen children. As a youth, he picked and chopped cotton, plowed with mules and later with a tractor, and lived in

Jamie Earl Isonhood was born in Benton in Yazoo County in 1944. An only child, he grew up in the Yazoo City area with his grandparents while his mother worked in Jackson and then later Memphis. He learned to play the piano on his own when he was five years old, and his first music

Blues guitarist, vocalist, and bandleader John Horton was born in Arcola in 1959. His family initially lived in Holly Ridge, and then moved to the outskirts of Greenville, where he currently resides. He grew up with his father, who worked as a bulldozer driver, a job that Horton has had since shortly after graduating from

Jimmy “Duck” Holmes is the proprietor of one of the oldest juke joints in Mississippi, the Blue Front in Bentonia. In the mid-2000s he began performing blues actively after many years of performing casually and has already garnered several awards and many accolades. He is a practitioner and conscious advocate of a distinctive blues style

Born in Sunflower, Mississippi, in 1943, David Lee Durham was raised in the blues. He never darkened the door of a schoolhouse and moved from farm to farm to pick cotton. He could pick 400 pounds of cotton by the age of thirteen. Music was his release. Durham was a self-taught musician. Like many other

Eddie Cusic was born January 4, 1926, in the Wilmot community south of Leland, Mississippi. He grew up farming with his family and was first inspired to play the blues from hearing men play at suppers and other get-togethers in his community. Like many Delta musicians of his generation, his first attempts to play were

Widely acclaimed as one of the best drummers in the blues, Sam Carr was born Samuel Lee McCollum in 1926 outside of Marvell, Arkansas. His father was the influential blues guitarist and vocalist Robert Lee McCollum, who recorded under the names Robert Lee McCoy and Robert Nighthawk, but Carr didn’t meet him until he was

Johnnie Billington was born in 1935 in Crowder, Mississippi, a small community on the Quitman/Panola county line. His father was a sharecropper and he grew up working on the farm. He first became interested in music through listening to the legendary blues show, King Biscuit Time, which was broadcast from nearby Helena, Arkansas. Billington’s father