Willie Dixon

Willie Dixon, born in Vicksburg, Miss., grew up singing bass in a gospel quartet. He blew into Chicago when he was 17, fixed on becoming a prizefighter - and became a blues man instead. The new Willie Dixon: The Chess Box (three MCA LPs, two cassettes or CDs) is a monument to what Dixon contributed to the musical and lyrical language of blues. It's a knockout. As the resident songwriter, bass player and arranger at Chess Records, Dixon worked with the singers who would define the rough edges of Chicago - and thereby urban - blues.

It's the most soulful Sade record yet. It's Whitney with some history. It's Armatrading hurt without the mind games. And Oasis (Atlantic ) is also Roberta Flack's best music in years. Sade should click her heels and wish for the kind of effortlessly sophisticated harmony Flack dishes out on "Uh-uh Ooh-Ooh Look Out (Here It Comes)" and "Something Magic. " Saying no to novelty, Flack again comes up with tunes that beg her slinky, cooing form of improvisation. Here is soul- baring balladry that squeezes fresh juice from old cliches, and at the same time exposes the lowest-common-denominator tendencies of her so-called peers.

And deal the cards, roll the dice. If it ain't that Chuck E. Weiss. - From "I Wish I Was in New Orleans," by Tom Waits Chuck E. Weiss sounds like a publicity stunt, a concoction of apocrypha. Oh sure, you think, he got into music as a kid after the neighborhood trashman, one "Pappy" Frye, gave him a bunch of blues records he'd fished out of the garbage. Yeah, he sang with Willie Dixon while he was in high school - and toured with Lightnin' Hopkins during his teens and early 20s, playing stand-up snare drum.

Before there was My Morning Jacket, the Shins and such, there were the Black Crowes. They made the pop world safe for stoned soul and hippie-ish rock steeped in the legacy of hillbilly blues, gospel and country. Lanky howler Chris Robinson, guitar-playing bro Richard, and their Georgia pals set the standard with 1992's Southern Harmony and Musical Companion. There was a grizzled swagger to their prickliest tunes - holy, sad and sensual songs that raised the ghosts of Duane Allman, Willie Dixon and Brian Jones while maintaining its mad uniqueness - this at a time when the turgid Nirvana ruled the roost.

"Please don't smoke doobie. You will be ejected if you do. " You don't hear those kinds of warnings at concerts much anymore, but that's what the announcer at the 23 East Cabaret said about 15 minutes before Jack Bruce took the stage Friday night. The relatively small club in Ardmore was bustling, mostly with men in their 30s who lined up in the snow four hours before the sold-out show started. It's not that often that you get to see Bruce. It's even less often that he plays with former sidekick Ginger Baker, who along with Bruce and Eric Clapton made up the '60s supergroup Cream.

The English singer Paul Young has until now been known primarily as an interpreter of other people's songs, but he has composed most of the material on Between Two Fires (Columbia ) himself. For at least the first side of this album, Young manages to create music as good as any he has interpreted in the past, and the second side's "Why Does a Man Have to Be Strong?" is a terrific contemporary soul ballad. Throughout, his blue-eyed-soul style is very good, his voice husky and strong, his phrasing deceptively artless.

CHICAGO - Jessy Dixon, 73, a singer and songwriter who introduced his energetic style of gospel music to wider audiences by serving as pop singer Paul Simon's opening act, died Monday. Miriam Dixon said her brother died Monday morning at his Chicago home. She said he had been sick but declined to provide additional details. During a more-than-50-year career, Mr. Dixon wrote songs for several popular singers, including jazz and rhythm-and-blues singer Randy Crawford. He later wrote songs performed by Cher, Diana Ross, Natalie Cole, and Amy Grant.

Spurred by retailer protests, Geffen Records gave in to pressure last summer to alter album-cover art by the heavy-metal outfit Guns 'N' Roses. The band's debut disc originally featured a painting of a woman being savaged by a robot. Nearly a year later, complaints from several large retail and distribution outlets over explicit artwork have prompted another company to take similar action. Enigma Records recently announced it would alter album covers by Great White and Poison. The changes on Poison's Open Up and Say Ahh!

Wcomes to the blues, accept no substitutes. Drink only the real stuff - heart-rending and soul-satisfying American music, easy going down, yet true to gritty heartland traditions almost as old as the nation itself. Right now, we're enjoying a blues boom at music stores (Tower Records, 3rd Street Jazz & Rock, 21st Century Sound and Discovery Disks all have decent blues selections). MCA has been milking its recent acquisition of the Chess catalogue, the most important collection of post-WW II rhythm and blues music and the inspiration for so much of today's popular rock and funk forms.

Craig Tillman has just finished a set of blues on the little corner stage at Bobby's Seafood. He puts his harmonica in his pocket and positions himself in the small crowd that is now watching 16-year-old Matt Tuttle do uncanny justice to a Jimi Hendrix guitar riff. Tillman, 48, smiles and surveys the audience, which is made up mostly of other musicians who have come to play at the free, weekly open-mike blues session. "This is great," he says. "It's cheaper than therapy. " Tillman, a contractor from Narberth, has been playing "harp" and singing at Bobby's most Wednesdays for close to three years.

CHICAGO - Jessy Dixon, 73, a singer and songwriter who introduced his energetic style of gospel music to wider audiences by serving as pop singer Paul Simon's opening act, died Monday. Miriam Dixon said her brother died Monday morning at his Chicago home. She said he had been sick but declined to provide additional details. During a more-than-50-year career, Mr. Dixon wrote songs for several popular singers, including jazz and rhythm-and-blues singer Randy Crawford. He later wrote songs performed by Cher, Diana Ross, Natalie Cole, and Amy Grant.

Back in 2006, when everybody else was pretending that everything was OK, Bob Dylan knew better. "The buying power of the proletariat has gone down," he croaked on "Workingman's Blues #2," making like a cross between Karl Marx and Merle Haggard on his album Modern Times. "Money's getting shallow and weak. " And now that everything - or the global economy, at least - has gone bad, Dylan is singing a song on his new album, Together Through Life (Columbia . out of four stars)

Before there was My Morning Jacket, the Shins and such, there were the Black Crowes. They made the pop world safe for stoned soul and hippie-ish rock steeped in the legacy of hillbilly blues, gospel and country. Lanky howler Chris Robinson, guitar-playing bro Richard, and their Georgia pals set the standard with 1992's Southern Harmony and Musical Companion. There was a grizzled swagger to their prickliest tunes - holy, sad and sensual songs that raised the ghosts of Duane Allman, Willie Dixon and Brian Jones while maintaining its mad uniqueness - this at a time when the turgid Nirvana ruled the roost.

Bo Diddley, 79, the pioneering guitarist and songwriter who helped give birth to rock-and-roll and whose signature "Bo Diddley beat" became an archetypal rhythm powering hits by Buddy Holly, the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, U2, and Bow Wow Wow, died yesterday. He died of heart failure at his home in Archer, Fla., according to his representative, Susan Clary. In May 2007, he suffered a stroke while on a concert tour in Iowa, and he had a heart attack the following August. Bo Diddley was an electrifying performer and a profoundly influential guitarist known for playing a "cigar box" rectangular Gretsch guitar.

Back in the 1920s, the heyday of such titans as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, women were the marquee names in the blues. That may no longer be the case, but the blues remains a powerful form of self-expression for women as well as men, as the following new releases make clear. We'll start with "the Queen of the Blues," Koko Taylor. On Royal Blue (Alligator . ), her first album in seven years, the 64-year-old singer still sounds gruff, lusty and bigger than life. When Royal Blue falters, it is because of arrangements that reach for a contemporary rock edge but often just grate.

There came a time in 1997 when Chris Schutz and Nick Schnebelen realized their teenage blues band Killin' Floor was never going to make a killing in their hometown of Kansas City, Mo. "We wanted to make a drastic change," says Schutz, now 21, "because the music scene in Kansas City sucks, basically. " The baby-faced Schutz is sitting in a Manayunk brew pub with organist Justin DiFebbo, 25, and drummer Steven "Zil" Fessler, 23, his partners in the band that changed its name to K-Floor after being threatened with a lawsuit by a San Francisco outfit that also took its rubric from the Howlin' Wolf blues.

And deal the cards, roll the dice. If it ain't that Chuck E. Weiss. - From "I Wish I Was in New Orleans," by Tom Waits Chuck E. Weiss sounds like a publicity stunt, a concoction of apocrypha. Oh sure, you think, he got into music as a kid after the neighborhood trashman, one "Pappy" Frye, gave him a bunch of blues records he'd fished out of the garbage. Yeah, he sang with Willie Dixon while he was in high school - and toured with Lightnin' Hopkins during his teens and early 20s, playing stand-up snare drum.

Craig Tillman has just finished a set of blues on the little corner stage at Bobby's Seafood. He puts his harmonica in his pocket and positions himself in the small crowd that is now watching 16-year-old Matt Tuttle do uncanny justice to a Jimi Hendrix guitar riff. Tillman, 48, smiles and surveys the audience, which is made up mostly of other musicians who have come to play at the free, weekly open-mike blues session. "This is great," he says. "It's cheaper than therapy. " Tillman, a contractor from Narberth, has been playing "harp" and singing at Bobby's most Wednesdays for close to three years.

The blues comes in lotsa shapes and colors, as this week's big fat bag o' CD reviews suggests. If you like chunk-a-funk blues with grooves galore, take a taste of Chico Banks' "Candy Lickin' Man" (Evidence). The showboatin' guitar player for gospel-pop crossover greats the Staple Singers and a decent warbler to boot, Banks' own set carries some of the same rhythmic thump as the Staples. But his music is decidedly nonsectarian and, on the title track, downright suggestive. The Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band's sophomore effort "Trouble Is . . . " (Revolution)

George Thorogood has never been subtle. You might gather this from a guy who calls his first-state backup combo the Delaware Destroyers. From a lifelong blues-natic who's been milking the catalogues of John Lee Hooker, Chuck Berry and Willie Dixon - and the same three chords - for nine albums of straight-to-the-solar-plexus barroom rock. A guy who put his career over the top by cranking an industrial-strength Bo Diddley riff all the way to 11 and proclaiming "I'm B-B-B-B-BAD!" Or, in so many words, he'll tell you himself.