'Soul Blues' Bands // p 1 of 1

Albert King

Albert Nelson (April 25, 1923 – December 21, 1992), known by his stage name Albert King, was an American blues guitarist and singer whose playing influenced many other blues guitarists. He is perhaps best known for the popular and influential album Born Under a Bad Sign (1967) and its title track. He, B.B. King, and Freddie King, all unrelated, were known as the "Kings of the Blues." The left-handed King was known for his "deep, dramatic sound that was widely imitated by both blues and rock guitarists."

He was once nicknamed "The Velvet Bulldozer" because of his smooth singing and large size–he stood taller than average, with sources reporting 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) or 6 ft 7 in (2.01 m), and weighed 250 lb (110 kg)–and also because he drove a bulldozer in one of his day jobs early in his career.

King was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1983. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. In 2011, he was ranked number 13 on Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

Early life

Albert King was born on a cotton plantation in Indianola, Mississippi. During childhood he sang at a church with a family gospel group, in which his father played the guitar. One of 13 children, he grew up picking cotton on plantations near Forrest City, Arkansas, where the family moved when he was eight years old.

King's identity was a longtime source of confusion. He stated in interviews that he was born in Indianola on April 25, 1923 (or 1924), and was a half-brother of B.B. King (an Indianola native) but, documentation suggests otherwise. King stated that whenever he performed at Club Ebony in Indianola, the event was celebrated as a homecoming, and he cited the fact that B.B.'s father was named Albert King. However, when he applied for a Social Security card in 1942, he gave his birthplace as "Aboden" (most likely Aberdeen, Mississippi) and signed his name as Albert Nelson, listing his father as Will Nelson. Musicians also knew him as Albert Nelson in the 1940s and early 1950s.

He started using the name Albert King in 1953 as an attempt to be associated with B.B King; he was billed as "B.B. King's brother". He also used the same nickname as B.B King, "Blues Boy", and he named his guitar Lucy (B.B. King's guitar was named Lucille). B.B. King later said: "He called his guitar 'Lucy,' and for a while he went around saying he was my brother. That bothered me until I got to know him and realized he was right; he wasn't my brother in blood, but he sure was my brother in the blues."

According to King, his father left the family when Albert was five, and when he was eight he moved with his mother, Mary Blevins, and two sisters to an area near Forrest City, Arkansas. He said his family had also lived in Arcola, Mississippi, for a time. He made his first guitar out of a cigar box, a piece of a bush, and a strand of broom wire. He later bought a real guitar for $1.25. As a left-hander learning guitar on his own, he turned his guitar upside down. He picked cotton, drove a bulldozer, worked in construction, and held other jobs until he was able to support himself as a musician.

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Bobby "Blue" Bland

Robert Calvin Bland (né Robert Calvin Brooks; January 27, 1930 – June 23, 2013), known professionally as Bobby "Blue" Bland, was an American blues singer.

Bland developed a sound that mixed gospel with the blues and R&B. He was described as "among the great storytellers of blues and soul music... [who] created tempestuous arias of love, betrayal and resignation, set against roiling, dramatic orchestrations, and left the listener drained but awed." He was sometimes referred to as the "Lion of the Blues" and as the "Sinatra of the Blues" His music was also influenced by Nat King Cole.

Bland was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1981, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame in 2012. He received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame described him as "second in stature only to B.B. King as a product of Memphis's Beale Street blues scene".

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Eric Kranso

Soulive and Lettuce co-founder, singer, multi-instrumentalist, and two-time GRAMMY® Award-winning songwriter-produce Eric Krasno continues to evolve with each record, project, and performance. Something of a musical journeyman, his extensive catalog comprises three solo albums, four Lettuce albums, twelve Soulive albums, and production and/or songwriting for Norah Jones, Robert Randolph, Pretty Lights, Talib Kweli, 50 Cent, Aaron Neville, and Allen Stone. As a dynamic performer, he’s shared stages with Rolling Stones, Dave Matthews Band, John Mayer, and The Roots. Out of seven nominations, he picked up two GRAMMY® Awards for his role as a songwriter and guitarist on Tedeschi Trucks Band’s Revelator and guitarist on Derek Trucks Band’ Already Free. In 2019, he served up Telescope under the KRAZ moniker. The cinematic concept album earned widespread acclaim from the likes of Relix and Salon who hailed it as “a timely New York story.” On his 2021 fourth full-length solo offering Always, he defines himself as not only an artist, but also as a husband, father, and man across these ten tracks with inimitable instrumentation, eloquent songcraft, and raw honesty.

Grammys

• Tedeschi Trucks Band - Revelator (Best Blues Album Winner) Songwriter/Guitarist
• Tedeschi Trucks Band - Live In Oakland (Best Contemporary Blues Album Nominee) Guitarist
• Derek Trucks Band - Already Free (Best Contemporary Blues Album Winner) Guitarist
• Ledisi - Turn Me Loose (Best R&B Album Nominee) Producer
• Pretty Lights - Color Map Of The Sun (Best Electronic Album Nominee) Multi-Instrumentalist
• Tedeschi Trucks Band - Live in Oakland (Best Contemporary Blues Album Nominee) Songwriter
• Robert Randolph - Got Soul (Best Contemporary Blues Album Nominee) Songwriter/Guitarist

Producer Highlights

• Aaron Neville - Apache (Producer/Songwriter Full Album)
• 50 Cent - My Gun Go Off (Producer/Writer)
• Talib Kweli & Norah Jones - Soon The New Day (Producer)
• Talib Kweli & Justin Timberlake - Nature (Producer/Writer)
• Vieux Farka Toure - The Secret feat. Dave Mathews & various special guests (Producer Full Album)
• Lawrence - Breakfast (Producer Full Album)
• Marcus King Band - Producer

Collaborations

• Gramatik & Eric Krasno - Recovery
• Gramatik & Eric Krasno - Torture (featured on ‘Narcos’ & ’Step it Up’)
• Griz & Eric Krasno - Wicked
• Griz & Eric Krasno - Gotta Push On

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Koko Taylor

Koko Taylor (born Cora Anna Walton, September 28, 1928 – June 3, 2009) was an American singer whose style encompassed Chicago blues, electric blues, rhythm and blues and soul blues. Sometimes called "The Queen of the Blues", she was known for her rough, powerful vocals.

Life and career
Born on a farm near Memphis, Tennessee, Taylor was the daughter of a sharecropper. She left Tennessee for Chicago in 1952 with her husband, Robert "Pops" Taylor, a truck driver. In the late 1950s, she began singing in blues clubs in Chicago. She was spotted by Willie Dixon in 1962, and this led to more opportunities for performing and her first recordings. In 1963 she had a single on USA Records, and in 1964 a cut on a Chicago blues collection on Spivey Records, called Chicago Blues. In 1964 Dixon brought Taylor to Checker Records, a subsidiary label of Chess Records, for which she recorded "Wang Dang Doodle", a song written by Dixon and recorded by Howlin' Wolf five years earlier. The record became a hit, reaching number four on the R&B chart and number 58 on the pop chart in 1966, and selling a million copies. She recorded several versions of the song over the years, including a live rendition at the 1967 American Folk Blues Festival, with the harmonica player Little Walter and the guitarist Hound Dog Taylor. Her subsequent recordings, both original songs and covers, did not achieve as much success on the charts.

"Taylor sounds like you always wanted those women with Big in front of their names to sound—powerful, even rough, without ever altogether abandoning her rather feminine register."
— Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981)

Taylor became better known by touring in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and she became accessible to a wider record-buying public when she signed a recording contract with Alligator Records in 1975. She recorded nine albums for Alligator, eight of which were nominated for Grammy awards, and came to dominate ranks of female blues singers, winning twenty-nine W. C. Handy/Blues Music Awards.

She survived a near-fatal car crash in 1989. In the 1990s, she appeared in the films Blues Brothers 2000 and Wild at Heart. She opened a blues club on Division Street in Chicago in 1994, which relocated to Wabash Avenue, in Chicago's South Loop, in 2000 (the club is now closed).

In 2003, she appeared as a guest with Taj Mahal in an episode of the television series Arthur. In 2009, she performed with Umphrey's McGee at the band's New Year's Eve concert at the Auditorium Theater, in Chicago.

Taylor influenced Bonnie Raitt, Shemekia Copeland, Janis Joplin, Shannon Curfman, and Susan Tedeschi.

In her later years, she performed over 70 concerts a year and resided just south of Chicago, in Country Club Hills, Illinois.

In 2008, the Internal Revenue Service said that Taylor owed $400,000 in unpaid taxes, penalties and interest, for the years 1998, 2000 and 2001. In those years combined, her adjusted gross income was $949,000.

Taylor's final performance was at the Blues Music Awards, on May 7, 2009. She suffered complications from surgery for gastrointestinal bleeding on May 19 and died on June 3.

On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed Koko Taylor among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.

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