Memphis Music Scene

 Bishop, Rush, among Blues Music Award winners

Bluff City singer/harmonica player John Nemeth, up for six awards, won for best soul blues album, 'Memphis Grease'.

John Nemeth - Photo: Aubrey Edwards

Elvin Bishop - Photo: Barry Brecheisen

COMMERCIAL APPEAL
Bob Mehr - May 8, 2015

Bluff City singer/harmonica player John Nemeth, who was up for six awards, managed to nab just one for best soul blues album for Memphis Grease. Memphis-bred Charlie Musselwhite also scored the 28th award of his career, with a win as best harmonica player.

Veteran guitarist/singer Elvin Bishop was the big winner at the 36th annual Blues Music Awards, held in Memphis on Thursday night.

The sold-out ceremonies, which took place at downtown’s Cook Convention Center, saw Bishop — on the heels of being elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Butterfield Blues Band earlier this year — take home the best band, song and album awards for his work on Can’t Even Do Wrong Right.

Fellow veteran, folk-blues artist John Hammond earned a pair of awards in the best acoustic album and artist categories for his record, Timeless.

Local and regional names also had a strong night as Mississippi’s Bobby Rush won the coveted B.B. King Entertainer award — his first, after multiple nominations — as well as honors for best soul blues artist. Bluff City singer/harmonica player John Nemeth, who was up for six awards, managed to nab just one for best soul blues album for Memphis Grease. Memphis-bred Charlie Musselwhite also scored the 28th award of his career, with a win as best harmonica player.

The late Johnny Winter — who died in July 2014 — was honored for best rock blues album, for his posthumously released Step Back. Meanwhile, For Pops, a tribute to Muddy Waters — by his son Mud Morganfield and Kim Wilson of the Fabulous Thunderbirds — earned the nod for best traditional blues album.

Other notable names who walked away with wins included Keb’ Mo’ for contemporary blues album, Gary Clark Jr. for contemporary blues artist, and Ruthie Foster, who earned the Koko Taylor award for best traditional blues female artist.

The awards also saw a small class of artists inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. The group included 83 year-old Atlanta bluesman Tommy Brown, British guitar great Eric Clapton and rock and R&B pioneer Little Richard.

This year’s awards have been the subject of intense interest. The ceremonies come as part of a big launch weekend with the Blues Foundation opening its long-planned physical location for the Blues Hall of Fame to the general public today on South Main (see today’s Go Memphis section for a full story).

The multi-hour awards ceremony was recorded by Sirius/XM Radio. It will air on the satellite network’s B.B. King’s Bluesville station on Saturday at noon (and will be rebroadcast Sunday at midnight and Tuesday at 6 p.m.). The event will also be edited down for a public television broadcast in the fall and a later DVD release.  Read at source

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John Nemeth - In early 2013, John Németh traded his life on the west coast to settle down in Memphis, Tennessee. He and Jaki, that girlfriend he followed to California, had married and started a family, and Memphis made sense for multiple reasons: It’s centrally located for touring, the cost of living is inexpensive, and the river town is the historical ground zero for American roots music.

“I moved to Memphis because it is the epicenter for soul and blues,” Németh confirms. “The wealth of knowledge runs deep in the instincts of its musicians and its studios.”

For more on John Nemeth, go here

Reminiscent of 1950s and 1960s R&B blues sounds coming out of Memphis and Muscle Shoals, John Nemeth, along with the Bo-Keys*  bring back a lot of memories for me.  ~Deltalady



*Not to be confused with The Bar-Kays, a mid-1960s instrumental soul/funk band, or The Mar-Keys, a 1950s/1960s studio session band. Nevertheless, this "new" "old" band gained plenty of cred with their adherence to those old session bands in the era of the Memphis Sound and Muscle Shoals groups. The Bo-Keys have had a remarkable series of Blues Music Award-nominated recordings.  The multi-generational [and in the tradition of early session groups in Muscle Shoals and Memphis, multi-racial] cast of players – some in their eighth decade – bring a high level of virtuosity developed cutting literally hundreds of hits during the ‘60s and ’70s to those recordings. Bo-Keys web site

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Fallon, Richards to Attend Memphis Music Hall of Fame Induction

By Andy Meek, The Daily News

Updated 12:05PM                            

                

Jimmy Fallon, host of NBC’s “The Tonight Show,” and Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards will be among the attendees at this weekend’s Memphis Music Hall of Fame induction ceremony at the Cannon Center for the Performing Arts.

Fallon is inducting his friend and fellow entertainer Justin Timberlake at the Saturday, Oct. 17, event. Richards is set to induct rock guitar pioneer Scotty Moore, a part of the early lineup backing Elvis Presley.

Entertainers set to perform as part of the induction ceremony include guitarist Steve Cropper, a former member of Booker T. and the MGs; drummers Jim Keltner and Steve Jordan; blues vocalist Tracy Nelson; R&B artist Melanie Fiona and Charlie Rich Jr., the son of famed musician and singer Charlie Rich.

This year, the Memphis Music Hall of Fame is honoring inductees Alberta Hunter, Al Jackson Jr., Scotty Moore, Charlie Rich, Sam & Dave and Justin Timberlake. Sam Moore of Sam & Dave and Timberlake are scheduled to attend.

The Memphis Rock 'n' Soul Museum administers the annual Memphis Music Hall of Fame announcement and induction, in cooperation with other music organizations and attractions in Memphis.  Read more at source

Music Legacy

Newman takes reins at Blues Foundation           

By LANCE WIEDOWER

Barbara B. Newman is The Blues Foundation’s new president and CEO.
She takes the reins of the organization which opened its new public face
 – the Blues Hall of Fame – in May.
(Daily News/Andrew J. Breig)

         
When Barbara Newman took over as president and CEO of The Blues Foundation, it was her first job in the music industry.

But to be clear, Newman’s path has been pointing to the position since she was a child meeting musical icons such as Duke Ellington and Leonard Bernstein.

Her grandfather’s twin brother was a session player in Muscle Shoals, Ala., and at Stax, where he was a violinist on Isaac Hayes’ classic “Shaft.” He also was a charter member of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra.

And a young Newman was a witness to it all.
“From the time I was really young, that music piece was important to me,” said Newman, who replaced the retiring Jay Sieleman Oct. 1. “I was raised with it. But it wasn’t a path I planned for myself.”

Today, Newman leads The Blues Foundation to further its mission to preserve blues history, celebrate recording and performance excellence, support education and expand appreciation, awareness and enjoyment of the art.

The public facing piece of that mission is the Blues Hall of Fame, which opened in May in the storefront of the foundation’s South Main Historic Arts District office. The hall has existed since the 1980s, but only this year has a physical home where it helps support the foundation’s educational mission.

“By having a footprint where people can engage with the blues, it will give the opportunity for that music to be preserved and for people to experience it in a live setting,” Newman said. “I see the Blues Hall of Fame as a key point of preserving history.”

More than 350 performers, industry professionals, recordings and literature have been inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. Having the physical presence, at 421 S. Main St. across the street from the National Civil Rights Museum, gives the foundation an important opportunity to honor these contributors while educating visitors on music’s impact.

“Being directly across from the Civil Rights Museum, visitors can learn about the struggle then walk across the street to hear the music of the struggle,” Newman said. “But just because it’s called the blues doesn’t mean it’s sad and oppressive. People who haven’t taken the time to listen because they think it’s sad music, when they hear it they want to engage in the music. That’s part of the education process.”

Newman grew up in Memphis. After graduating from Brown University she went to work in New York City at National Westminster Bank USA. She went through the loan officer development program and moved along a path that gave her experience in corporate finance.

She left work when her children were born, and in 1989 she and her husband, Bruce Newman, decided to move the family to Memphis. Read more at source

B.B. King dies at 89

B. B. King, Defining Bluesman for Generations, Dies at 89
By TIM WEINER MAY 15, 2015

B. B. King, whose world-weary voice and wailing guitar lifted him from the cotton fields of Mississippi to a global stage and the apex of American blues, died on Thursday at his home in Las Vegas. He was 89.

 

John Fudenberg, the coroner of Clark County, Nev., said the cause was a series of small strokes attributable to Type 2 diabetes, The Associated Press reported. Mr. King, who was in hospice care, had been in poor health but had continued to perform until October, when he canceled a tour, citing dehydration and exhaustion stemming from the diabetes.

 

Mr. King married country blues to big-city rhythms and created a sound instantly recognizable to millions: a stinging guitar with a shimmering vibrato, notes that coiled and leapt like an animal, and a voice that groaned and bent with the weight of lust, longing and lost love.

 

“I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions,” Mr. King said in his autobiography, “Blues All Around Me” (1996), written with David Ritz.

 

In performances, his singing and his solos flowed into each other as he wrung notes from the neck of his guitar, vibrating his hand as if it were wounded, his face a mask of suffering. Many of the songs he sang — like his biggest hit, “The Thrill Is Gone” (“I’ll still live on/But so lonely I’ll be”) — were poems of pain and perseverance.

 

The music historian Peter Guralnick once noted that Mr. King helped expand the audience for the blues through “the urbanity of his playing, the absorption of a multiplicity of influences, not simply from the blues, along with a graciousness of manner and willingness to adapt to new audiences and give them something they were able to respond to.”

 

B. B. stood for Blues Boy, a name he took with his first taste of fame in the 1940s. His peers were bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, whose nicknames fit their hard-bitten lives. But he was born a King, albeit in a shack surrounded by dirt-poor sharecroppers and wealthy landowners.

Mr. King went out on the road and never came back after one of his first recordings reached the top of the rhythm-and-blues charts in 1951. He began in juke joints, country dance halls and ghetto nightclubs, playing 342 one-night stands in 1956 and 200 to 300 shows a year for a half-century thereafter, rising to concert halls, casino main stages and international acclaim.

 

He was embraced by rock ’n’ roll fans of the 1960s and ’70s, who remained loyal as they grew older together. His playing influenced many of the most successful rock guitarists of the era, including Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

 

Mr. King considered a 1968 performance at the Fillmore West, the San Francisco rock palace, to have been the moment of his commercial breakthrough, he told a public-television interviewer in 2003. A few years earlier, he recalled, an M.C. in an elegant Chicago club had introduced him thus: “O.K., folks, time to pull out your chitlin’s and your collard greens, your pigs’ feet and your watermelons, because here is B. B. King.” It had infuriated him.

 

When he saw “longhaired white people” lining up outside the Fillmore, he said, he told his road manager, “I think they booked us in the wrong place.” Then the promoter Bill Graham introduced him to the sold-out crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the chairman of the board, B. B. King.”

 

“Everybody stood up, and I cried,” Mr. King said. “That was the beginning of it.”

 

By his 80th birthday he was a millionaire many times over. He owned a mansion in Las Vegas, a closet full of embroidered tuxedos and smoking jackets, a chain of nightclubs bearing his name (including a popular room on West 42nd Street in Manhattan) and the personal and professional satisfaction of having endured.  Read more at source