In the mythology of the blues, Willie Dixon stands as one of the great architects — not only of sound, but of symbol. Born in 1915 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Dixon came of age in a world where evil was not a metaphor but a social reality. By the time he began

I first encountered the music of Jimi Hendrix when I was about ten years old, through the 1994 film Forrest Gump starring Tom Hanks. The movie featured two of Hendrix’s most iconic tracks — “All Along the Watchtower,” originally written by Bob Dylan but transformed by Hendrix into a psychedelic

To understand the soul of Foundational Black American music, one must stand where Robert Johnson once stood—at the crossroads. Recorded in 1936 in a makeshift San Antonio hotel room, “Cross Road Blues” has become one of the most mythologized songs in American history. For some, it is a ghost

As we open our October series, we step into the shadowy realm of the supernatural—a space where music, folklore, and lived history collide. For Foundational Black Americans, songs about the uncanny have long carried layered meanings. Behind the talk of voodoo, hoodoo, spells, and spirits are echoes of ancestral