Luther "guitar Junior" Johnson It s Good To Me

Another barn-burner mixing the guitarist's West-side roots with soul and blues shadings to present some of the fieriest contemporary blues on the market. Saxist Gordon Beadle and keyboardist Joe Krown distinguish themselves behind Johnson.

Now this is more like it. Johnson and his New England-based Magic Rockers sizzle the hide off the genre with tough West Side-styled grooves redolent of Johnson's Chicago upbringing but up-to-the-minute in their execution. With this set, Johnson fully came into his own as a recording artist.

Johnson's third and final album for producer Ron Levy's Bullseye Blues diskery is every bit as spellbinding as the prior pair. Whether fronting his latest batch of Magic Rockers or going it alone, Johnson is totally convincing.
Luther "Guitar Junior" Johnson was a blues guitarist with an impressive résumé, backing Muddy Waters, Magic Sam, and John Lee Hooker before he found fame on his own, earning a following for his soulful vocal style and incisive guitar work. A solid performer in the Chicago style, Johnson found his greatest success while working out of New England, with 1990's I Want to Groove with You and 1992's It's Good to Me capturing his impassioned attack and wiry soloing. Latter-day efforts like 2001's Talkin' About Soul showed he'd lost none of his swagger with the passage of time, and 2020's Won't Be Back No More was an intimate acoustic set that captured the guitarist at his most personal.

A step in the right direction - much better production, savvier song selection, including a few snappy originals, and the five-piece Roomful of Blues horn section in staunch support. The guitarist's Magic Rockers include keyboardist Ron Levy, who would go on to produce Johnson's Bullsye Blues output.
Luther "Guitar Junior" Johnson was a blues guitarist with an impressive résumé, backing Muddy Waters, Magic Sam, and John Lee Hooker before he found fame on his own, earning a following for his soulful vocal style and incisive guitar work. A solid performer in the Chicago style, Johnson found his greatest success while working out of New England, with 1990's I Want to Groove with You and 1992's It's Good to Me capturing his impassioned attack and wiry soloing…

Various Artists - The Real Music Box: 25 Years of Rounder Records (1995) {9CD Set, Rounder Records ‎CDAN25}
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© 1995 Rounder Records | ‎CD AN 25
Blues / Country / Jazz / Folk / Soul / Funk / Bluegrass

Within the discount, ugly-duckling packaging of The Real Music Box: 25 Years of Rounder Records lie nine CD swans worth several hundred times their weight in superficial music-industry gold records. Since 1970, Massachusetts-based Rounder has been a stalwart sanctuary of various musics at the root of what has recently been labeled "Americana." The retrospective is segmented into four thematic two-disc sets, each offering a staggering 30 to 50 tracks where legendary names rub shoulders with bright young Rounder talent.

Rounder's four-CD Box of the Blues is, by looking at its inclusion of tracks, seemingly an ambitious proposition. But looks can be deceiving. Compiled and introduced by vice president of A&R Scott Billington - a man whose credentials, when it comes to fighting for and preserving blues traditions, are unassailable - these discs become a kind of theme-oriented blur of Rounder's substantial catalog holdings. Billington's schemata are quirky, sometimes ironic, and sometimes downright scary and profound as the set's first and second discs' "61 Highway" and "One More Mile" attest. The first CD concentrates its energies on the revelation of blues as it came up from the Mississippi Delta in the music of Fred McDowell, Johnny Shines, Etta Baker, Blind Willie McTell, John Hurt, and others and mutated up north to Chicago with Otis Spann, Robert Nighthawk, and others…

One of the finest blues guitarists to emerge during the '80s, Ronnie Earl often straddled the line between blues and jazz, throwing in touches of soul and rock as well. His versatility made him one of the few blues guitarists capable of leading an almost entirely instrumental outfit, and his backing band the Broadcasters became one of the more respected working units in contemporary blues over the course of the '90s, following Earl's departure from Roomful of Blues. Ronnie Earl was born Ronald Horvath in Queens, New York, on March 10, 1953. He didn't start playing guitar until after he entered college at Boston University in the early '70s and became fascinated with the local blues scene…

The box set attempts to present a history of the blues from the dawning of recorded music to the present day. It offers a survey of many different blues sub-genres and tangential music styles, as well as a survey of almost all the most notable blues performers over time. In 2004, the box set won two Grammy Awards for "Best Historical Album" and "Best Album Notes." That same year it was #2 on Billboard's Top Blues Albums chart.