Imagine the heat of a 1920s Texas street corner: the hum of traffic, the scent of dust, and a voice so raw it sounds like gargling gravel. This was the world of Blind Willie Johnson, a man whose slide guitar technique utilized a pocket knife to wring harmony and moaning unison from the strings. Born in 1897 near Temple, Texas, Johnson was not born blind. His childhood began with the simple joy of a cigar box guitar gifted by his father. However, the light did not last; at the age of seven, his s...

Consider the electric tension of Harlem’s Apollo Theater in 1952: the hum of an expectant crowd and a woman standing nearly six feet tall, possessing a voice so thunderous it supposedly didn't even need a microphone. This was the moment Willie Mae Thornton became Big Mama, a nickname bestowed by the theater’s manager after she blew the roof off the building. Born in 1926 in the small town of Ariton, Alabama, Thornton was the daughter of a Baptist minister and a choir-singing mother. Her musical ...

Some insist that the crown of rock and roll belongs to a swivel-hipped truck driver from Tupelo, yet the only piece of the genre currently hurtling through interstellar space was written by a middle-class beautician from St. Louis who spent his seventeenth year in a reformatory. This is the central dissonance of Chuck Berry: a man who established the foundation of modern rebellion while being more interested in the smooth vocal clarity of his idol, Nat King Cole, than the rough edges of the blue...