Paul butterfield blues band biography samples
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Time is a great equalizer. While the legend and legacy of The Paul Butterfield Blue Band has started to fade, as members of The Blues Hall Of Fame and The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, they have influenced two generations of electric blues bands and harmonica players that have followed.
When they pulled into Boston’s Unicorn Coffee House during May of 1966, it was their classic lineup that took the stage. Harmonica player Paul Butterfield, guitarist Mike Bloomfield, guitarist/vocalist Elvin Bishop, keyboardist Mark Naftalin, drummer Billy Davenport, and bassist Jerome Arnold were at the height of their powers. Butterfield and Bloomfield were extraordinary musicians, while Bishop and Naftalin were just a cut below.
Butterfield was a harp virtuoso. He focused on each note rather than chords, which gave his playing a very different sound and flavor.
Their set at the Unicorn has been bootlegged a number of times, but this is its official release debut. The only negative here is the sound quality, which struggles to be average. The good news is the instruments are sharper than the vocals, which is the important thing with this band. Real Gone Music are wizards at cleaning up the sound of archival recordings, so the original tapes were probably quite rough. In some ways, the
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It is useful to mention here that while Butterfield's brand of urban blues has deep roots in the post war Chicago blues tradition, his past is quite different from his predecessors, John Lee Curtis and Marion Jacobs. Both of those artists emerge from the rural blues of the south, which becomes electrified in the 30s and 40s, and generally caters to an urban and rural black audience. Scoring commercial success with their songs in this market is paramount to career longevity. This is not a primary goal of Butterfield's.
John Lee Curtis is unique in that he is an unplanned pioneer in the field of urban blues, and while she does earn a few commercial successes with songs like Good Morning Little School Girl ; it is within a very limit aud•