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Herbert Hunter was the son of Baptist minister and came from a large family. As a young child he started singing for his father in church with his brother Rufus (who was later to record for Ted Jarrett and Bob Holmes label Ref-O-Ree). Jarrett first encountered Hunter in 1957 singing outside a bar on Jefferson Street, whilst Hunter was attempting to get noticed and obtain work. Jarrett saw his potential talent and befriended him. Jarrett taught Hunter songs on the piano and eventually found him a job at the Del Morocco on Jefferson Street. In the late 1950s Ted Jarrett...

Peggy Walker (nee Gaines) (b. 1944) was born and raised in Nashville, in a family of four children. There was no specific professional music talent within the family at that time - her entry into singing was through church, school competitions and a variety of local and regional singing competitions, from around the age of ten years. Peggy attended Cameron High School where she sang in the glee club and school choir, before she met band leader Bob Holmes and embarked on a professional singing career. Robert L. Holmes (b. unknown d. 2000) was born in Mississippi but raised in...

Gallatin is a tiny rural town in Sumner County, a mere thirty miles from Nashville. New York author Ken Abraham notes in More Than Rivals that Gallatin was a typical segregated main street southern town in the 1960s with separate drinking fountains, parks and pools and engagement in sports activities. Working class families of both races did interface to some extent, finding themselves experiencing common financial hardship and living conditions, though blacks typically held the lowest paid jobs available in the area. Abraham explains that African-American entrepreneurship did gradually create community based services such as taxi services, dry-cleaners, barber shops...

B.B King, the consummate bluesman, a bluesman with a guitar named Lucille. Actually a succession of guitars, but the origin of the name comes part way through this autobiography of raw, painful and ultimately uplifting honesty. In December 1949, aged 24, Riley ‘Blues Boy’ King is gigging in a house-turned club in Twist, Arkansas. A rubbish bin half- filled with lighted kerosene is warming the freezing night air but is knocked over as a fight between two men breaks out. A river of fire rages through the room and B.B King joins the stampede to flee the burning building. Realising...

In contrast to many of the other artists discussed in Rhythm Message, Merle Calvin Spears was a singer very much in the gritty R&B vein. For few recordings he made, Spears demonstrated a vocal talent similar to that of Bobby Bland. The author recalls that somebody once said of Bland (or perhaps Little Milton, though it could easily apply to both) that the artist belonged to a genre “too bluesy for soul fans, too soulful for blues fans”; Merle Spears could be described similarly. Yet all these artists have firmly established their musical home in northern soul Hall of Fame....