Alvin Youngblood Hart
Encyclopedia
Grammy Award
A Grammy Award — or Grammy — is an accolade by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States to recognize outstanding achievement in the music industry...
-winning American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
musician
Musician
A musician is an artist who plays a musical instrument. It may or may not be the person's profession. Musicians can be classified by their roles in performing music and writing music.Also....* A person who makes music a profession....
.
Career
Born in Oakland California, Hart had family connections with Carroll CountyCarroll County, Mississippi
-Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 10,769 people, 4,071 households, and 3,069 families residing in the county. The population density was 17 people per square mile . There were 4,888 housing units at an average density of 8 per square mile...
, Mississippi
Mississippi
Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...
, and spent time there in his childhood
Childhood
Childhood is the age span ranging from birth to adolescence. In developmental psychology, childhood is divided up into the developmental stages of toddlerhood , early childhood , middle childhood , and adolescence .- Age ranges of childhood :The term childhood is non-specific and can imply a...
, hearing his relatives stories of Charlie Patton
Charlie Patton
Charlie Patton , better known as Charley Patton, was an American Delta blues musician. He is considered by many to be the "Father of the Delta Blues", and is credited with creating an enduring body of American music and personally inspiring just about every Delta blues man...
, "being around these people who were there when this music was going on".
Thus influenced by the country blues
Country blues
Country blues is a general term that refers to all the acoustic, mainly guitar-driven forms of the blues. It often incorporated elements of rural gospel, ragtime, hillbilly, and dixieland jazz...
, Hart is known as one of the world's foremost practitioners of that genre. Hart is also known as a faithful torchbearer for the 1960s and 1970s guitar
Guitar
The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...
rock of his youth
Adolescence
Adolescence is a transitional stage of physical and mental human development generally occurring between puberty and legal adulthood , but largely characterized as beginning and ending with the teenage stage...
, as well as Western Swing and vintage country. His music has been compared to a list of diverse artists ranging from Leadbelly
Leadbelly
Huddie William Ledbetter was an iconic American folk and blues musician, notable for his strong vocals, his virtuosity on the twelve-string guitar, and the songbook of folk standards he introduced....
, Spade Cooley
Spade Cooley
Donnell Clyde Cooley , better known as Spade Cooley, was an American Western swing musician, big band leader, actor, and television personality...
to acoustic
Acoustic guitar
An acoustic guitar is a guitar that uses only an acoustic sound board. The air in this cavity resonates with the vibrational modes of the string and at low frequencies, which depend on the size of the box, the chamber acts like a Helmholtz resonator, increasing or decreasing the volume of the sound...
and electric guitar
Electric guitar
An electric guitar is a guitar that uses the principle of direct electromagnetic induction to convert vibrations of its metal strings into electric audio signals. The signal generated by an electric guitar is too weak to drive a loudspeaker, so it is amplified before sending it to a loudspeaker...
as well as banjo
Banjo
In the 1830s Sweeney became the first white man to play the banjo on stage. His version of the instrument replaced the gourd with a drum-like sound box and included four full-length strings alongside a short fifth-string. There is no proof, however, that Sweeney invented either innovation. This new...
and sometimes the mandolin
Mandolin
A mandolin is a musical instrument in the lute family . It descends from the mandore, a soprano member of the lute family. The mandolin soundboard comes in many shapes—but generally round or teardrop-shaped, sometimes with scrolls or other projections. A mandolin may have f-holes, or a single...
. Bluesman Taj Mahal
Taj Mahal (musician)
Henry Saint Clair Fredericks , who uses the stage name Taj Mahal, is an American Grammy Award winning blues musician. He incorporates elements of world music into his music...
once said about Hart that "The boy has got thunder in his hands." Hart himself said "I guess my big break came when I opened for Taj Mahal for four nights at Yoshi's
Yoshi's (jazz club)
Yoshi's is the preeminent jazz club of the San Francisco Bay Area.Started as a Japanese restaurant in Berkeley by Yoshi Akiba, a World War II war orphan, , and her friends Kaz Kajimura and Hiroyuki Hori, the club soon moved to a larger space on Claremont Avenue in Oakland, California and began to...
.
In 1996 he made a powerful and individual album debut, Big Mama's Door, playing street, slide and standard guitars and banjo on a mixture of dug-up and new-grown blues.
In 2003, Hart's album
Album
An album is a collection of recordings, released as a single package on gramophone record, cassette, compact disc, or via digital distribution. The word derives from the Latin word for list .Vinyl LP records have two sides, each comprising one half of the album...
Down in the Alley was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album
Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album
The Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album was awarded from 1983 to 2011. From 2001 to 2003 the award recipients included the producers and engineers as well as the artists...
. In 2005, Hart received a Grammy Award
Grammy Award
A Grammy Award — or Grammy — is an accolade by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States to recognize outstanding achievement in the music industry...
for his contribution to Beautiful Dreamer - The Songs of Stephen Foster
Stephen Foster
Stephen Collins Foster , known as the "father of American music", was the pre-eminent songwriter in the United States of the 19th century...
.
Hart was featured in the 2003 Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders
Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders is a German film director, playwright, author, photographer and producer.-Early life:Wenders was born in Düsseldorf. He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg and Düsseldorf...
film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
, The Soul of a Man, which was featured in Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...
's film series, The Blues
The Blues (film)
The Blues is a 2003 documentary film series produced by Martin Scorsese, dedicated to the history of blues music. In each of the seven episodes, a different director explores a stage in the development of the blues...
. Hart was also featured in the documentary, Last of the Mississippi Jukes.
Hart appeared in the film, The Great Debaters
The Great Debaters
The Great Debaters is a 2007 American biopic period drama film directed by and starring two-time Academy Award winner Denzel Washington and produced by Oprah Winfrey and her production company, Harpo Productions...
in 2007, playing a 1930s juke joint musician.
Discography
- 1996: Big Mama's Door (OKeh RecordsOkeh RecordsOkeh Records began as an independent record label based in the United States of America in 1918. From 1926 on, it was a subsidiary of Columbia Records.-History:...
) - 1998: Territory
- 2000: Start with the Soul
- 2002: Down in the Alley
- 2005: Motivational Speaker
Awards
- W.C. Handy Award for best new artist - 1997
- Down BeatDown BeatDown Beat is an American magazine devoted to "jazz, blues and beyond" to indicate its expansion beyond the jazz realm which it covered exclusively in previous years. The publication was established in 1934 in Chicago, Illinois...
magazineMagazineMagazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...
award for best blues album of the year for Territory, 1999