Living Blues Magazine

Living Blues #290 (May/June 2024) features 38-year-old Hubby Jenkins on the cover. Jenkins is one of the best of the recent wave of young African American musicians doing a deep dive into pre-war blues, string band, and other roots music, and developing their own sound based on these acoustic styles. An early member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Jenkins is now exploring his musical path as a solo artist. Guitarist Leonard “Lowdown” Brown relocated from Chicago to Houston in 1981 and over the last 43 years has made a name for himself as one of the most versatile musicians on the blues scene there. On the heels of his critically acclaimed 2023 CD, Blues Is Calling Me, we talk with Brown about his musical journey. Photographer and researcher Axel Küstner first traveled from his native Germany to the United States in 1978 where he explored the backroads of the blues, tracing its roots. Over the next 13 years Küstner recorded and photographed dozens of rural blues artists at their homes. We present a collection of some his rare photographs. This issue’s Let It Roll focusses on Georgia-born Tampa Red. The artist grew up in Tampa, Florida, and by 1925 had mastered his slide guitar technique and moved to Chicago. On the heels of his 1928 hit Selling That Stuff / Beedle Um Bum with Georgia Tom Dorsey as the Hokum Boys, Tampa became a major figure in the urban pre-war blues scene. In this issue’s column we explore his years with Lester Melrose and Bluebird Records and focus on an October 11, 1937, session featuring Blind John Davis on piano.
All of this plus Breaking Out with Gail Ceasar, LB Talks To with Sue Foley, the 2024 Living Blues Festival Guide, the latest in Blues News, and over 40 record and book reviews.