Acdct.n.t

Jerry Williams’—aka Swamp Dogg—first love was country music, listening to it as a Navy family kid growing up in Portsmouth, Virginia. “My granddaddy, he just bought country records out the asshole,” Swamp remembers. “Every Friday when he came home from the Navy yard he’d stop off and get his records, like ‘Mule Train’ by Frankie Laine, or ‘Riders in the Sky’ by Vaughn Monroe.” His first time performing on stage, in fact, was a country song at a talent show when he was six years old: “I did Red Foley’s version of ‘Peace in the Valley.’”

Guitarist T-Bone Walker is one of the links–if not THE link–between the suave, intricate jazz styles of Charlie Christian and Lonnie Johnson and the crackling electricity of Buddy Guy and Jimi Hendrix. Not only is he massively influential as a guitarist, but he was a dynamic showman (played that guitar behind his head way before Hendrix did) and his original songs have become standards ("Stormy Monday Blues"). Originally entitled HOME COOKING, this 1966 album from blues wizard T-Bone Walker, where he's accompanied by only three other musicians (with no drummer), proves the blues can be mellow without losing the sting or the zing.

Don't Be Cruel was to Bobby Brown what Control was to Janet Jackson – a tougher, more aggressive project that shed his "bubblegum" image altogether and brought him to a new artistic and commercial plateau…