Roots of B.B. King

Robert William Cray is an American blues guitarist and singer. He has led his own band and won five Grammy Awards.

Elmore James was an American blues guitarist, singer, songwriter, and bandleader. Noted for his use of loud amplification and his stirring voice, James was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. His slide guitar technique earned him the nickname "King of the Slide Guitar".

Dwight Arrington Myers, known professionally as Heavy D, was a Jamaican-American rapper, record producer, and actor. He was the leader of Heavy D & the Boyz, a group that included dancers/hype men G-Whiz and "Trouble" T. Roy, as well as DJ and producer Eddie F. The group maintained a sizeable audience in the United States through most of the 1990s. The five albums the group released included production mainly by Teddy Riley, Marley Marl, DJ Premier, Myers's cousin Pete Rock, and "in-house" beatmaker Eddie F. Myers also released four solo albums and discovered Soul for Real and Monifah.

"The Thrill Is Gone" is a slow minor-key blues song written by West Coast blues musician Roy Hawkins and Rick Darnell in 1951. Hawkins's recording of the song reached number six in the Billboard R&B chart in 1951. In 1970, "The Thrill Is Gone" became a major hit for B.B. King. His rendition helped make the song a blues standard. In June 2026, CBS News included the song in its list of the 250 essential American songs of the past 250 years.

Hotter than July is the nineteenth studio album by American singer, songwriter, and musician Stevie Wonder, released on September 29, 1980, by Tamla, a subsidiary of Motown Records. Wonder primarily recorded the album in Los Angeles, California, at Wonderland Studios, which he had recently acquired. The album peaked at number three on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart and was certified Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on February 3, 1981. It was Wonder's most successful album in the UK, where it peaked at number two on the UK Albums Chart and produced four top-10 singles. Music videos were produced for the album's first, third, and fourth singles.

Booker T. Washington "Bukka" White was an American Delta blues guitarist and singer. His first full-length biography, The Life and Music of Booker "Bukka" White: Recalling the Blues (2024), has been published by the University Press of Mississippi.