Jo Anne Kelly – The Girl I Love, She Got Long Curly Hair

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3rkWVuqtHo” thumbnail=”23577″ title=”Jo Anne Kelly – The Girl I Love, She Got Long Curly Hair” description=”Jo Anne Kelly , The Girl I Love, She Got Long Curly Hair” /]

Blues Women Anthology

Jo Ann Kelly (5 January 1944 — 21 October 1990) was an English blues singer and guitarist. “To many American performers”, an obituarist wrote, “Jo Ann Kelly was the only British singer to earn their respect for her development of what they would be justified in thinking as ‘their’ genre”.

Kelly was born in Streatham, South London. She and her brother, Dave, were both musicians. She appeared on two albums with Tony McPhee.

Me and the Devil (1968) and I Asked for Water, She Gave Me Gasoline (1969) were both released on Liberty Records. She also appeared on two John Dummer Band albums: John Dummer Blues Band (1969) and Oobleedoobleejubilee (1973).

Canned Heat and Johnny Winter both tried to recruit Kelly, but she preferred to stay in the United Kingdom. She expanded to the European club circuit, where she worked with guitarist Pete Emery and with other bands. In the early 1980s, she was a member of the Terry Smith Blues Band.

In 1988, Kelly began to suffer from headaches. In 1989 she had an operation to remove a malignant brain tumour. She died in 1990, aged 46. The latest Kelly compilation album, Blues and Gospel, is available on Blues Matters! Records.

Blues is a musical form and genre that originated in African-American communities in the “Deep South” of the United States around the end of the 19th century.

The genre is derived from European folk music, spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads.

The blues form, ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues and rock and roll, is characterized by the call-and-response pattern and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. The blue notes are also an important part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect called a groove.

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