Steve Knopper

Over the last decade, veteran harpist Charlie Musselwhite found his voice. It's a gnarled, rubbery Mississippi drawl, and at 62, Musselwhite is a master at surrounding it with both upbeat...

Irma Thomas, the great R&B singer of "Time Is On My Side" and "Done Got Over," didn't intend to infuse this CD with the ghosts of Hurricane Katrina. But they...

Bald, fat, tattooed and vocally challenged, Ted "Popa Chubby" Horowitz has been toiling on the blues-club circuit since the early '90s with remarkable staying power. He plays a mean electric...

Alligator Records released one album in 1971, its first year--"Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers," from a South Side blues band so raw, joyful and explosive that founder Bruce Iglauer...

Had the Allman Brothers Band, Black Crowes, Lenny Kravitz, Big Head Todd and the Monsters and 6 zillion other bluesy rock bands not gone down this path already, thirtysomething singer-songwriter...

Most of the rock bands that paid tribute to the late northern Mississippi juke-joint hero Junior Kimbrough on last year's hit-or-miss "Sunday Nights" took the easy approach--loud, fast, raw, explosive....

Chicago is packed with legendary blues sidemen you'd never recognize even if they shoved their harmonicas in your face--and Willie "Big Eyes" Smith, who blew harp on Bo Diddley's "Diddy...

Everything about this New Orleans rock quintet is unorthodox--rather than a drummer, there's percussionist Steve Amedee, who pounds a tambourine on his lap, and the central instrument is John Magnie's...

Some say Otis Rush is the world's best blues guitarist, and he's certainly underrated compared to his cuddly contemporary Buddy Guy. But this document of a 1976 concert at Chicago's...

The hellfire imagery on the "Racin' the Devil" cover--a skeleton in an Elvis Presley hairdo playing an upright bass while a beautiful, cigarette-smoking devil woman sits atop a crashed '50s...