After you spend a lot of hours sitting crouched over your guitar, or over your desk, get up and hoop for awhile! Feels great, it’s lots of fun, great thing to bring to a party. And it trims your middle and strengthens your back. But if you are an adult or a big kid, don’t [...]
Category > News
Flying with your guitar
No, I don’t mean riding it like a broom. I mean taking it on the plane. If you’re traveling to a gig, you have to bring the guitar. But if you’re just flying on a vacation or business trip, should you take the guitar along? And if so, how? First of all, yes, you should [...]
Talent Is Overrated notes
This is my summary of, and notes on, Talent Is Overrated, a fascinating book by Geoff Colvin. Innate abilities pretty much don’t exist. Colvin gives the examples of Mozart and Tiger Woods, two people often thought of as blessed with superhuman abilities. Yet when you examine their lives you see that both had fathers who [...]
Oprah’s Aunt Katherine loves my book
Oprah Winfrey’s Aunt Katherine is a huge fan of Blues Traveling, and carries it around with her in her car, I learned recently. Katherine Carr Esters of Kosciusko, Miss., actually is Oprah’s cousin, although Oprah addresses her older relative as “Aunt Katherine.” Ted Ownby, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at [...]
Mother’s Best Music Festival
Mother’s Best Music Festival — it’s named after another brand of flour that once sponsored a radio show in Helena, Ark. (King Biscuit Flour was the sponsor of King Biscuit Time, which lent its name to the town’s much bigger and longer-running festival, the King Biscuit Blues Festival, until an unfortunate legal challenge took that [...]
No more cotton in the Delta
That sounds like a blues song but it’s just an observation, of a big surprise on my recent trip down there. Most of the fields that used to have cotton, just a few years ago, now grow corn or soybeans. Rice seems to be more common too. But cotton is way down. An old cotton [...]
Down at the BB King Museum
The BB King Museum — a great new stop on the blues tour! I got to play and speak there recently, the weekend before the annual BB King Homecoming, when BB comes back to his hometow – Indianola, Miss. — to play outdoors and in a club. And I stopped back down in Indianola during [...]
Review of Blues Traveling, third edition
This is from the funny-named but highly respected country-blues website weeniecampbell.com, written by the great guitarist and teacher John Miller: “Blues Traveling–The Holy Sites of Delta Blues”–Steve Cheseborough, University Press of Mississippi Author Steve Cheseborough must be very happy at the reception his Delta Blues guidebook, “Blues Traveling”, has received, for it is now in [...]
Beethoven’s Ninth on the harp
This past Friday night, I had finished my gig at a restaurant and was sitting at the bar having something to eat and drink. A goateed man, probably in his early 60s, was also sitting there and drinking good Scotch. He asked about the music and I told him sorry, but he had just missed [...]
Blues Revue’s review of Fetch It!
From Blues Revue magazine, June/July 2009: Fetch It! is another intriguing, self-released collection of prewar-style blues from Steve Cheseborough. Cheseborough’s harmonica overdubs are effective, but at the heart of his sound are his percussive, rhythmic guitar and highly individual singing. The combination brings new light to Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “One Dime” and Tampa Red’s “Love [...]
