where the blues live now

Performer

Jessie Mae Hemphill cut a unique and colorful figure as queen of the North Mississippi Hill Country blues scene. A three-time winner as traditional female blues artist of the year in the 1987, 1988 and 1994 W.C. Handy Blues Awards (later renamed the Blues Music Awards), Hemphill came from a long line of musicians dating back to her great-grandfather Dock Hemphill and including her parents and aunts as well as her grandfather, Sid Hemphill, who recorded for Alan Lomax and Lewis Jones in 1942. Her rhythmic, rough-hewn music was spirited and gritty–unadorned, in contrast to her sequined apparel, wigs, cowboy hats, and other bold accoutrements.

Performer

Henry Townsend, a key contributor to the St. Louis blues sound of the pre-World War era, enjoyed one of the longest careers in blues history. He recorded in every decade from the 1920s through the 2000s and was preparing to perform at a festival when he died on September 24, 2006, at the age of 96. A few months later he shared a posthumous GRAMMY Award for the album “Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen: Live in Dallas,” recorded alongside fellow veterans Robert Lockwood, Honeyboy Edwards and Pinetop Perkins.

Performer

Blind Willie Johnson never recorded the blues, but the Texas guitar evangelist’s music has enraptured a multitude of blues fans and musicians for nearly a century. His genre has come to be called “holy blues” for its similarities to the blues format, its intensity and the superb slide guitar technique. “The Soul of a Man,” an episode in Martin Scorsese’s documentary series ”The Blues,” was named after a 1930 Johnson record and featured bluesman Chris Thomas King portraying Johnson—and actor Laurence Fishburne voicing Johnson in the scripted narration. And when the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes were launched in 1977, they each carried a recording, “The Sounds of Earth,” with audio tracks including Johnson ’s “Dark Was the Night—Cold Was the Ground.”

Performer

William Bell, best known for his pioneering work at Stax Records in Memphis, has kept that honored legacy alive during his long career as soulful singer, songwriter, producer and label owner. Bell’s music has also encompassed gospel, doo-wop, jazz, R&B, blues, reggae, funk, disco and collaborations with rappers, and in recent years he has been a perennial contender in the soul blues categories of the Blues Music Awards.

Performer

Bob Stroger, still actively touring at the age of 94, is reaping the rewards for his decades of laying the foundation for countless blues bands. No performer has ever been inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame at an older age. He was also the 2024 recipient of the Blues Music Award for Instrumentalist – Bass, the fifth time he had earned the honor.

Stroger had been a journeyman bassist with several small blues, R&B and jazz groups in Chicago before he became a steady, recognizable fixture on the international blues scene, initially thanks to his work behind Otis Rush starting in 1975. Even then, his surname (pronounced STRO-jer) was so unfamiliar to fellow musicians (and record producers) that the first times his name appeared in album credits he was listed as “Bob Strokes,” the way Rush and Sunnyland Slim knew him.