Living Blues Magazine

Living Blues #305 (November/December 2026) features native New Orleanian Deacon John Moore. Moore has spent the last 70 years making music the New Orleans way. A gumbo of blues, gospel, rhythm and blues, funk, and early rock, Deacon John’s music has a pinch of it all. Since the late 1950s Moore has played with just about every New Orleans musician and is featured on countless recordings. In his first LB interview, Moore takes us back to the 1940s and walks forward through Crescent City music history and its many changes he has witnessed and experienced. “Omar wrote this” is a common phrase heard at southern soul festivals. “Omar” is Omar Cunningham, the most successful and in-demand songwriter in the scene today. He has written hits for Willie Clayton, O.B. Buchana, and others. For the last 25 years Cunningham’s star has continued to rise as a songwriter and hitmaker, and as a top touring artist. Vocalist Jeannie Holiday has been singing her entire life, from her earliest years in her grandmother’s evangelical church to R&B and blues in the 1970s. Over the last 20 years she has been gigging in Milwaukee and Chicago, including a set at this year’s Chicago Blues Festival. This issue’s Let It Roll! focusses on Jackie Brenston. On March 5, 1951, Jackie Brenston, Ike Turner, Raymond Hill, Willie Kizart, and Willie Sims drove 75 miles from Clarksdale to Memphis to record at the new Memphis Recording Service with Sam Phillips. The band recorded five sides that day but it was when Brenston stepped to the mic that history was made. The frenetic pace and drive of Rocket “88” took it to No. 1 on the Billboard charts and for decades it has been credited as the first rock ’n’ roll song or, at least as Ike described it, “the cause of rock and roll existing.”
All of this plus Living Blues Talks To Sherman Holmes, the latest in Blues News, and reviews of new releases from Keb’ Mo’, Rhiannon Giddens, and Eddie Cotton and reissues from Little Milton and Skip James.