Tampa Red & Georgia Tom
Tampa Red (January 8, 1904 - March 19, 1981), born Hudson Woodbridge but known from childhood as Hudson Whittaker, was an influential American musician. He is best known as an accomplished and influential blues guitarist who had a unique single-string bottleneck style. His songwriting and his silky, polished slide technique influenced other leading Chicago blues guitarists, such as Big Bill Broonzy and Robert Nighthawk, as well as Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Mose Allison and many others. In a career spanning over 30 years he also recorded pop, R&B and hokum records.
Thomas Andrew Dorsey (July 1, 1899, Villa Rica, Georgia - January 23, 1993, Chicago). He is known as "the father of gospel music". Earlier in his life he was a leading blues pianist under the name Georgia Tom. He learned to play the piano as a young man, and after studying music formally in Chicago, became an agent for Paramount Records. He put together a band for Ma Rainey called the Wild Cats Jazz Band in 1924.
He started out playing at rent parties with the names Barrelhouse Tom and Texas Tommy, but he was most famous as Georgia Tom, under which name he teamed up with Tampa Red to record the raunchy 1928 hit "Tight Like That", a sensation, selling seven million copies. The two went on to record almost 90 sides, sometimes as The Hokum Boys or, with Frankie "Half Pint" Jaxon, as Tampa Red's Hokum Jug Band.
Their partnership ended in 1932. Tampa Red remained much in demand as a session musician, and in 1934 signed to Victor Records, with whom he stayed until 1953. He formed the Chicago Five, a group of session musicians who created what became known as the Bluebird sound. By the 1940s he was playing electric guitar. In 1942 "Let Me Play With Your Poodle" was a #4 hit on Billboard's new "Harlem Hit Parade", forerunner of the R&B chart, and his 1949 recording "When Things Go Wrong with You (It Hurts Me Too)", another R&B hit, was covered by Elmore James. He was 'rediscovered' in the late 1950s, like many other surviving early recorded blues artists such as Son House and Skip James, as part of the blues revival. His final, undistinguished, recordings were in 1960. Having become an alcoholic after his wife's death in 1953, he died destitute in Chicago, aged 77.
Dorsey, who had already begun recording gospel music alongside blues in the mid 1920s, performed at the National Baptist Convention in 1930, and become the bandleader of two churches in the early 1930s, founded the first black gospel music publishing company, Dorsey House of Music, as well as his own gospel choir. After his first wife died in childbirth in 1932 along with his first son, he wrote his most famous song, one of the most famous of all gospel songs, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", which was covered by diverse artists both black and white, and was sung at the funerals of both Dr. Martin Luther King and US President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Dorsey wrote "Peace in the Valley" for Mahalia Jackson in 1937, which also became a gospel standard. He was the first African American elected to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and also the first in the Gospel Music Association's Living Hall of Fame. In 2002, one of his albums was added to the United States National Recording Registry. He died in Chicago, Illinois, aged 93. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
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