By Scott Zuppardo When music fans think of Macon, Georgia, they instantly think of three musical legends: Little Richard, Otis Redding and the Allman Brothers Band. The more knowledgeable might [...]
By Gabi Mendick When Charles Burroughs was only 8 years old in Tampa, Florida, his peers picked him on because of a speech impediment. To avoid their incessant bullying, Charles chose not to [...]
By Nick Loss-Eaton If you love Buddy Guy (and who doesn’t?) or if you’re a new fan captivated by the PBS “American Masters” episode about Buddy that premiered last week, we thought we’d spend [...]
By Ryan Lee Crosby Just off highway 49 at the south end of the Mississippi Delta, a secluded village quietly attracts passionate music lovers from every corner of the globe. Blues fans from [...]
By Gabi Mendick Ross Wells and Greg Pugliese spent the Fourth of July in Fountain, North Carolina. The two “mostly retired” old friends who worked together as carpenters years ago, volunteered [...]
When Music Maker heads to the legendary Telluride Blues & Brews festival in September, we will bring along our own beloved Music Maker Blues Revue — a group filled with old friends like [...]
By Tim Duffy and Gabi Mendick Little Pink Anderson grew up in South Carolina playing guitar and singing with his father Pinkney “Pink” Anderson, a much beloved but not widely known blues player. [...]
By Tim Duffy Almost all the musicians who become part of the Music Maker family face various obstacles in getting their work to the public. Sometimes, they live in rural areas far from the big [...]
By Gabi Mendick Thank you so much to everyone who joined us at the opening of “Hanging Tree Guitars” at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C., last week! It was so [...]
By Gabi Mendick Until the pandemic of 2020, field trips, road trips and tours have always been an essential part of the framework of Music Maker. Our partner artists are musical treasures, but [...]
Harvey Dalton Arnold first gained the music world’s attention in a huge, arena-sized way: He was a member of The Outlaws, one of the giant wave of 1970s Southern rock bands that rose in the wake [...]
By Nick Loss-Eaton The Hamiltones have GRAMMY nominations on their shelves for performances with the great R&B singer Anthony Hamilton, but those shelves aren’t in LA or NYC or Nashville. [...]
By Nick Loss-Eaton The book was a graduation gift from a fan of my blues radio show on WVKR, the student radio station at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and it changed my life. “Music [...]
By Gabi Mendick Chattanooga-born musician Amythyst Kiah is simultaneously rooted in tradition and steeped in modernity. She speaks more to the living history of American music than any other [...]
When James “Bubba” Norwood graduated from Lincoln High School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1961, he was already a drummer, but he didn’t think he was much of one. Ike Turner thought [...]
By Nick Loss-Eaton This Friday will be the last “Bandcamp Friday,” a day when Bandcamp takes no cut for sales of music on its platform, so Music Maker has decided to blow it out. In addition to [...]
This summer marks a milestone for the Music Maker Foundation. For the first time, we will have three exhibitions on view at three different museums around the South. “Our Living Past” is already [...]
As it did for every touring musician, the pandemic changed everything for Dom Flemons, a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a 15-year friend of the Music Maker Foundation, and a [...]
By Gabi Mendick Ring up Benjamin Tehoval and you might be taken aback by the thick, jovial French accent on the other end of the line. When you listen to Benjamin’s one-man-band take on the [...]
Please read our full 2020 Program and Activities report here
By Scott Zuppardo “People say I was born with the blues,” Willie Farmer says. “The blues is in me.” There’s a loneliness that goes with growing up in the rural South. Willie Farmer has embraced [...]
Music Maker lost a dear friend and partner artist, Sam Frazier Jr., on March 23. I first heard of Sam when a package arrived at our office in 2015. One of Sam’s nieces had filled a manila [...]
LIVESTREAM MUSIC SERIES HONORING PIEDMONT BLUESWOMAN ELIZABETH ‘LIBBA’ COTTEN PERFORMANCES BY AMYTHYST KIAH, JOHNNY RAY DANIELS, THE HAMILTONES, ALEXA ROSE, AND HARVEY DALTON ARNOLD [...]
We first made Essie Mae Brooks’ acquaintance in 1995, when she was 66 years old. Today, at age 92, she’s still singing the gospel and writing her own songs. When we established the Music Maker [...]
It overjoys all of us at Music Maker to wish our partner artist David Bryant a happy 62nd birthday. David’s roots in the blues run deep. His grandfather, Curley Weaver, was a great [...]
In late February, Music Maker was pleased to welcome back Brittany Anderson as our social worker. Brittany had previously served in that position for us from April 2018 through December 2019. [...]
When you met Algia Mae Hinton, the first thing you would notice was her hands. They were weathered hands, hands that had picked a million cucumbers. They were a farm laborer’s hands, and they [...]
The music of Etta Baker first put its hooks in me when I was a hockey-playing, 15-year-old suburban kid in Connecticut. One of my friend’s older brothers had a massive folk music collection. We [...]
The world has now spent an entire year living with the COVID-19 pandemic. What has this meant for Music Maker’s many partner artists? Our social worker, Brittany Anderson, sums it up best: “What [...]
Thirty years working with blues musicians has taught me that there can be great irony woven into the stage names performers choose for themselves — particularly with female players who opt for [...]
Witnessing the Como Mamas, the amazing gospel group from Como, Mississippi, on stage will transport you. No matter if you see them at a festival or a concert hall, where you wind up is in [...]
Chance meetings have always played a huge part in how Music Maker has built up its roster of partner artists over the years. From the beginning, when James “Guitar Slim” Stephens told me I had to [...]
“Any tree could be a hanging tree.'” — Freeman Vines For the exhibition of Freeman Vines’ Hanging Tree Guitars, Music Maker commissioned Dr. Will Boone of North Carolina State University to [...]
Nick Loss-Eaton here again to offer a few of my picks from the Music Maker catalog for Bandcamp Friday. On March 5 and the first Fridays of April and May, Bandcamp will waive its cut of the [...]
To hear Ernie Vincent and the Top Notes’ 1970s single “Dap Walk” for the first time is like standing in a hurricane of funk. “Hey, get up, brothers! Don’t sit there with your head hangin’ [...]
Turns out that we’re not the only ones who believe that our partner artist Alabama Slim’s January album, “The Parlor,” is a masterful take on the blues. Here is a roundup [...]
“I went to Mr. Jefferson because a guy told me Mr. Jefferson had wood. And he said, ‘Vines, I’m gonna tell you right now. You’re black and I’m white. That wood there came [...]
“Ma told me all the time. ‘The Ku Klux Klan is gonna get you, boy, hanging ’round with that white man.’” — Freeman Vines For the exhibition of Freeman Vines’ Hanging Tree Guitars, Music Maker [...]
By Jed Finley These days it seems like everybody’s got the blues. At least that’s what Pat “Mother Blues” Cohen tells me. “I think a lot of people have the blues these days. It’s behind the [...]
“It would do you good to get in the country even if you do have to rough it. You can sit right here and look right at the sky and you can almost feel the Earth turning.” — Freeman Vines For the [...]
The seeds of Music Maker were planted in 1989, even though our Foundation didn’t take its current shape until five years later. I was still in my last semester of study for my master’s degree in [...]
If you haven’t joined Music Maker Listener’s Circle yet, perhaps No. 45 in our series will convince you that it’s finally time to do it. No. 45 in our series is called “A Geographic Cure.” Blues [...]
The music sales platform Bandcamp has announced that on the first Fridays in February, March, April, and May, it will not take its usual 15 percent cut on album sales. That means if you buy any [...]
This week, we were pleased to welcome the newest member of the Music Maker staff, Gabi Mendick, who will serve as our Advancement Coordinator. Gabi is a graduate of Tufts University in Boston, [...]
A few weeks ago, one of Music Maker’s most important partner artists, Freeman Vines, lost his right eye. And this is not a story about a sudden emergency that brought on the surgery to remove [...]
Since Netflix released its film “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” with Viola Davis masterfully playing the Mother of the Blues, critics all over the world have raved about the film. Rainey was a true [...]
