Blues

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.