Blues 2019

The late Irish blues rocker Rory Gallagher would have been pleased to see the Chess logo embossed on the three-disc Blues, a box of rare, unissued, acoustic, and live recordings. Issued to mark what would have been his half-century as a recording artist, 90-percent of the material here is previously unreleased. The discs are divided thematically: Electric, Acoustic, and Live. The booklet is wonderfully annotated with an authoritative essay from journalist and music historian Jas Obrecht; it places Gallagher in his rightful historical place as an electric blues rock pioneer alongside admirers Eric Clapton, Johnny Winter, Jimi Hendrix, and Peter Green.

Gary Hoey released his new blues album NEON HIGHWAY BLUES on March 15, 2019 on Provogue Records. Starting with 2013's DEJA BLUES and continuing with 2016's DUST & BONES, Hoey has tapped into his early musical influences and applied his own feral skills to take the format in a unique direction. He stays in the same lane on his latest endeavor, NEON HIGHWAY BLUES, steering its 11 tracks with the confidence and assuredness of a veteran and the freshness of someone who's still in the process of discovery and refinement – with the help of famous friends such as Eric Gales, Lance Lopez, Josh Smith and Hoey's 17-year-old son Ian.

No ordinary artist. No ordinary covers album. From the day he conceived the project to the moment he counted off the first song in the studio, Walter Trout had a bolder plan for Survivor Blues. "I'm riding in my car sometimes," says the US blues titan. "I've got a blues station on – and here's another band doing Got My Mojo Workin'. And there's a little voice in me that says, 'Does the world need another version of that song?' So I came up with an idea. I didn't want to do Stormy Monday or Messin' With The Kid. I didn't want to do the blues greatest hits. I wanted to do old, obscure songs that have hardly been covered. And that's how Survivor Blues started…"