Blues

Wait's two lyrical concept albums, Blood Money and Alice, are being reissued on vinyl for their 20th Anniversary. We listen back to archival interviews with the musician, broadcast in 2002 and 2011.

The renowned bluesman, who died in 2015, spoke to Fresh Air in 1996 about growing up as the son of a sharecropper — and leaving the plantation as a young man to pursue a career in music.

British singer and songwriter Billie Brag brings his guitar to the studio to play and sing some songs and talks about the Skiffle movement, the British adaptation of American blues and folk music that became popular in the 1950s and influenced the Beatles, Pete Townsend, Van Morrison and other British rockers.

He's been awarded the 2005 Pianist of the Year award by the Jazz Journalist's Association, and he also received the first ever 2005 Playboy Magazine Jazz Artist of the Year. His new album is called Same Mother, which reflects the 30-year-old musician's current interest in the blues.

A range of musicians, including Tom Waits and Sinéad O'Connor, cover gospel-blues performer Johnson on a new tribute album. Critic Milo Miles says the record's tracks are striking and inventive.

In the 1970s guitarist Bill Frisell was a student of jazz composer and arranger Michael Gibbs at Boston's Berklee College of Music. This is the album some Frisell fans have been wishing for.

Charters helped ignite the blues revival of the '50s and '60s. He made field recordings of forgotten and previously undiscovered performers. He also wrote two books. He died Wednesday; he was 85.

In the mid-1920s, Paramount Records was the leading blues label in America. The second box set featuring this music was released in late 2014.

Between 1917 and 1932, the label released thousands of records. Jack White's Third Man Records has joined with the reissue label Revenant to release the first of two packages documenting Paramount.

Dave and Phil Alvin have made their first full album together in nearly 30 years, a tribute to one of their early influences. "His persona was so big to me," Phil Alvin tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

The poet describes his new book — about the death of his father and the birth of his son — as having a blues sensibility. "There are moments of humor even in the sorrow," he says.

Dave Van Ronk's autobiography inspired Joel and Ethan Coen's new movie about a '60s folksinger. Though he died in 2002, a new anthology ought to help give Van Ronk a long-needed boost.

The jazz pianist's powerful 1976 album I Remember Bessie conveys a profound sense of loss.

In 1950, a red-haired Alabama boy who'd learned about radio and electronics in the U.S. Army opened a recording studio to document the blues and country music he loved. A new box set compiles the beginnings of Sam Philipps'

Huey Meaux wound up in jail twice, but he sure had a knack for finding talent in unlikely places.

Before he became the guitarist for ZZ Top, Billy Gibbons was in a band called the Moving Sidewalks that just missed its shot at stardom. The album the Moving Sidewalks never released in the late 1960s was released in late 2012 and is very much a period piece, albeit a very well-made one.

A new 12-disc compilation traces the history of electric blues from its inauspicious start through its heyday in the 1950s and '60s. Critic Ed Ward says Plug It In! Turn It Up! does "a great job of illuminating one particular aspect of the blues."

"The Empress of the Blues" gave voice the listeners' tribulations and yearnings of the 1920s and '30s. A new 10-CD box set collects the complete works of the colossus who straddled jazz and blues.

On Blak and Blu, you can hear the roar in Clark's blues guitar. But critic Ken Tucker says Clark remains a work in progress.