Mississippi MacDonald | en

The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi was an American gospel group. Powered by lead singer Archie Brownlee, their single "Our Father" reached the Billboard Rhythm & Blues charts in the early 1950s, one of the first gospel records to do so. The group originated in 1936 as a quartet of students from the Piney Woods School for the blind near Jackson, Mississippi. The students — Brownlee, Joseph Ford, Lawrence Abrams, and Lloyd Woodard — originally sang under the name "the Cotton Blossom Singers", performing both jubilee quartet and secular material, to raise money for the school. Their teacher, Martha Louise...

BLIND ROOSEVELT GRAVES (Mississippi Jook Band) Blind Roosevelt Graves was a moderately successful Mississippi bluesman and guitarist who mixed secular and sacred material and recorded a few songs during a relatively short career. However he has one significant claim to fame in that he is accorded by many as being the artist to make the earliest rock and roll recording. Very few biographical details of Blind Roosevelt Graves' early life are known. He was born in Rose Hill near Meridian, Mississippi, probably around the beginning of the 20th century. He and his brother Uaroy began playing juke joints in the...