Sam Redlark

  image generated by Grok The upper echelons of jazz and blues have traditionally coalesced into a loosely-knit royal family: The Empress of the Blues; The Queen of Soul; innumerable Dukes, Counts, Lords and Ladies: These honorary titles convey both delusions of grandeur and reverence from peers and dedicated fans; however, any actual monarchical influence these individuals project is indirect and nebulous at best. Dogie Ginn – the self-appointed “Pope of R&B” was a more serious proposition: A man who could walk the talk, he steered an entire genre of popular music through the middle part of the 20th century before abruptly changing the direction of the sound during the 1980s. “Why did I choose to call myself the pope of R&B?” he pondered during an interview with Nicholas Hart, in 1994. [printed in MOJO magazine #9] Why did I chose to call myself Pope? Hmmm, hhmmmmmmmm. Because the Pope in Italy looks out for the spiritual well-being of all of the Catholic people. I am not ...

image generated by Grok If we dispel from our minds any notions of a Garden of Eden, where God created the animals, who were in turn named by Adam, then we must consign our ancestors to the wilderness. There was never a paradise, nor was there any biblical fall from grace. There was only a bloody uphill struggle; a race to the top of the food chain. Out of necessity, early man would have categorised some animals as potential sources of food and others as dangerous predators; less frequently, he would regard some as allies. In that clouded era of human history, dogs were a presence lurking furtively in the corner of the eye. They were paw prints, pressed into the wet mud at dawn, marking out the perimeters of the earliest human settlements. At night they were silhouettes skulking around on the margins of temporary encampments. Gradually, over the seasons; down through the years, and the decades, and the centuries; across the overlap of the generations, they inched closer to the warmth a...