Gnappy

People Get Ready

Wookiefoot

Samuel James

Brown Bird

Night Beds

Wilco

Sonny Smith

The Clayton Brothers

Ivan & Aloysha

Chris Whitley

Dr. John

COMPILATIONS

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Ray Wylie Hubbard

Steel Pulse

COMPILATIONS

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Medeski Martin & Wood

Clinic

Silvana Kane

Louie Rankin

El Perro Del Mar

William Elliott Whitmore

Adam Green & Binki Shapiro

Ben Bedford

The James Taylor Quartet

Yo La Tengo

Little Sonny Jones

Little known outside his Crescent City homebase, singer Little Sonny Jones' pipes deserved wider acclaim. Thanks to the efforts of Black Top, who recently reissued this collection on CD, maybe he'll finally receive a little posthumously. Though cut in 1975, the set sounds as though it was done a couple of decades earlier. Pianist Dave "Fat Man" Williams (who handles a few vocals as well), saxists Clarence Ford and David Lastie, and guitarist Justin Adams were all vets of that bygone era, and their love for the genre shines through every infectious track.

Marvin Pontiac

R&B enigma Marvin Pontiac was born Marvin Toure in Detroit on March 30, 1932; he was the son of a Jewish New Yorker mother and Malinese African father, with the latter legally changing the family's last name to Pontiac (believing it to be a proper American surname) before abandoning his wife and child in 1934. Two years later, Pontiac's mother was institutionalized, and the boy relocated with his father to Bamako, Mali, where he absorbed the region's musical traditions before settling in Chicago at the age of 15. There he began playing the harmonica, suffering a beating at the hands of local blues legend Little Walter, who accused the teen of stealing his harp sound and signature riff. A humiliated Pontiac then hopped a bus to Lubbock, TX, where he served as a plumber's apprentice and, according to rumor, robbed a bank. He also began performing on the Louisiana-Texas club circuit.

The Living Sisters

Grace Potter And The Nocturnals

Mexican Institute of Sound

Invert

SALLY FORD & THE SOUIND OUTSIDE

COMPILATIONS

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Snowgoose

Josh Ritter