Mark Webb Therapist

Boogie Bill Webb fused the down-home country blues of his native Mississippi with the hothouse R&B of his adopted New Orleans to create an idiosyncratic sound unique in the annals of Southern music. Born March 24, 1924, in Jackson, MS, Webb received his first guitar a cigar box with strings made of screen wire at the age of eight; his style was most profoundly influenced by local bluesman Tommy Johnson, an entertainment fixture at the myriad fish-fry dinners organized by Webb's mother.

The perfect way to acquire drummer Chick Webb's recordings is to get his two Classics CDs which contain all of his performances as a leader, other than Ella Fitzgerald's features (which are in a separate Ella series) and a few numbers from Webb's final dates…

Strictly Jive is the Hep label's 25-track salute to Chick Webb, a formidable percussionist who led one of the toughest big bands of the 1930s. Strictly Jive concentrates upon the years 1935-1940, a period of time that represents the second half of the ten-year Webb dynasty. The Chick Webb orchestra was a jazz incubator from which emerged seasoned instrumentalists like Taft Jordan, Sandy Williams, Garvin Bushell, Hilton Jefferson, and Eddie Barefield, as well as future bandleaders John Kirby and Louis Jordan, and renowned composer and arranger Edgar Sampson. Saxophonist Wayman Carver, one of the few flutists in jazz during the 1930s, was a featured soloist with Chick Webb and may be heard piping away in front of the band on Wilbur Sweatman's "Down Home Rag." Most people who have heard of Webb associate him with his star vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, a dynamic woman who assumed leadership of the band after 30-year-old Chick Webb succumbed to spinal tuberculosis on June 16, 1939 in his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland.