Here’s a trivia question you can use to stump fellow music nerds.
This Georgia-born, Black artist influenced musicians from the Allman Brothers to Bob Dylan to the White Stripes. There’s an annual music festival in his hometown, a mile-long walking trail in his honor in another Georgia city where he spent much of his boyhood, and an Atlanta nightclub that bears his name. He’s in the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, and one of his signature songs is included in the “500 songs that shaped rock and roll,” assembled by the chief curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The answer isn’t Little Richard or Otis Redding. And it’s not Ray Charles or James Brown. It’s Blind Willie McTell, a 12-string guitar bluesman who recorded dozens of songs in the 1920s and 1930s, died in obscurity in 1959, but whose music continues to inspire artists today.
“It’s a revelation to your ears,” Nashville-based singer-songwriter Adia Victoria said about hearing McTell for the first time.
Victoria, a South Carolina native, dove into blues music while living in Atlanta more than a decade ago. During that time, she found a recording on YouTube of McTell’s “You Was Born to Die.”