June is Black Music Month, part 2 !

     When I was teaching, I loved teaching the 1920s, 1950s, and 1980s especially, because I got to pull out the all the pop cultural touchstones: movies, radio, tv, art, music, etc. When it came to the birth of rock and roll in the 1950s, I often started by saying something like "imagine country, blues, and gospel having an orgy, and rock and roll is born as a result." Without black artists and their "race music," as it was called then, there would be no rock and roll. Everyone knows there wouldn't be a Beatles or Rolling Stones without people like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino. Jerry Lee Lewis got his start and his style from sneaking out of his house as a boy and going to black "juke joints." It was always a lot of fun introducing my students to these greats, pioneers and founders who saw a lot of attention and success, even if it was not what they deserved, but there were even more black founding fathers and mothers of rock and roll who get far less credit.

    Ladies first:  Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton. Thornton was born in Alabama and grew up singing in the church before she left home and started traveling in R & B Revues, often called the "new Bessie Smith." She was the first to sing "Hound Dog", her biggest hit, three years before Elvis Presley recorded it.

    Sister Rosetta Tharpe was a huge gospel star before crossing over to rhythm and blues and rock and roll. Her voice and songs not only influenced the rock start of the 1960s, but her pioneering guitar technique, using heavy distortion on her electric guitar, was a direct influence on guitarists, like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Keith Richards.

    Howlin Wolf left Mississippi for Chicago and became a leader among the Chicago blues musicians. 

    For years, Howlin Wolf had a career-long rivalry with Muddy Waters who is often called the "father of modern Chicago blues." 

    Little Walter got his start playing harmonica with Muddy Waters, and he became possibly the greatest harmonica virtuoso ever. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll of Fame in 2008, and he remains the only artist to be inducted as a harmonica player.

       Even I had never really heard of Screamin Jay Hawkins until relatively recently, and wow, just wow. Why hasn't a movie about him been made? He was put up for adoption at 18 months and was adopted by a Blackfoot Indian couple. He forged a birth certificate in order to enlist in the army at age 13, allegedly seeing combat in World War II. He aspired to be an opera singer, but went down the blues path instead, and he often performed in animal skins and feathers and incorporated voodoo rituals into his performances.