Dark Road

Like Silly Putty or the X-Men's Mystique, Blues has always managed to do a lot of shape-shifting—without ever shucking its soul or its earthbound body. While some late-‘40s/early-‘50s bluesers were taking jazz to Jupiter (Willie Jackson's anarchic bop sax solo on Cootie Williams' “'gator Tail”), others were blueprinting R&B ballad style (Big Joe Turner's “Chains of Love”). Still others, like drummer/pianist Tiny Bradshaw, were laying down track for decades of sped-up hard stuff. His “The Train Kept A-Rollin'” was loudly recast in the ‘50s (by Johnny Burnette's Rock and Roll Trio), ‘60s (Yardbirds) and ‘70s (Aerosmith).