Wayne E. Goins

Director of Jazz Studies at Kansas State University, with a PhD in Music from Florida State University, Wayne Everett Goins is an accomplished Blues guitarist and author of five books on jazz, three of which were published by The Edwin Mellen Press: Emotional Response To Music: Pat Metheny’s Secret Story, The Jazz Band Director’s Handbook: A Guide To Success, and Charlie Christian, Jazz Guitar’s King of Swing. He has also written and writes for magazines Pure Guitar, Jazz Ambassador, Jazz Improv, Living Blues, Jazz Guitar Today, and Positive Feedback, among others,and wrote the 2014 biography Blues All Day Long: The Jimmy Rogers Story, which was awarded the “Blues Biography of the Year” by Living Blues Magazine.


  • Rock Chronicles, Part 9 — Badfinger’s Tragic Story Begins

    Badfinger’s new album was both falling behind schedule and becoming more expensive, and the label rejected the initial session tapes

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  • Rock Chronicles, Part 8 — Paul McCartney saves the poisoned Iveys (temporarily)

    1970 proved to be a landmark year in the annals of rock music.

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  • Rock Chronicles, Part 7 — Bobby Whitlock’s Key to the Highway

    Having completed a tour in England that featured George Harrison and Eric Clapton as guest guitarists, Delaney & Bonnie and Friends returned to America to help Clapton finish his solo debut and embark on a four-month tour to support the album.

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  • Rock Chronicles, Part 6 — On the Road With Eric Clapton

    The band, according to member Bobby Whitlock’s autobiography, had already gotten kicked off the Elektra label when it was touring, due to Delaney’s drunken antics with label owner Jac Holzman. Delaney & Bonnie manager Alan Pariser, who was close friends with Harrison, arranged for the group to be the opening act for Blind Faith, aka…

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  • Rock Chronicles, Part 5 — Mad Dogs & Englishmen

    In our last episode, Joe Cocker had just fired the members of his Grease band after recording his newest album, Cocker! His manager, Dee Anthony, was looking forward to returning to the U.S. to promote the highly anticipated album that featured Cocker originals and unreleased Beatles songs.

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  • Rock Chronicles, Part 4 — Gimme Shelter!

    Somewhere between the release of the album Accept No Substitute in July of 1969 and November of that year, Elton John began working on his second album. After the lackluster debut of Empty Sky, Elton made his mark with his self-titled second album, Elton John, featuring the tune “Your Song,” a beautiful ballad that remains…

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  • Rock Chronicles, Part 3 — The British are coming!

    Last we heard, producer David Anderle and recording engineer John Haeny had given British producer Glyn Johns a test pressing of Delaney & Bonnie’s new album, Accept No Substitute, which wound up in the hands (and ears) of George Harrison.

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  • Rock Chronicles, Part 2 — The adventures of Delaney & Bonnie

    Last you heard from me, husband-and-wife singing duo Delaney & Bonnie were working on their album Home, their first recording on the Memphis-based Stax label, between February and November of 1968. The general idea in the minds of the Stax executives was to create an album that would introduce the world to the “first white…

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  • Rock Chronicles, Part 1 — Joe Cocker, with a little help from his friends

    In 1966, a gruff-voiced blues singer was looking to put a band together that might finally propel his straggling career to the next level. Joe Cocker—born John Robert Cocker in 1944— lived on Tasker Road in the English city of Sheffield. As early as 1960, at the age of sixteen, Cocker was already well under…

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  • Clint Eastwood to Booker T. & the M.G.’s: “Hang ‘Em High”

    In an earlier piece, I spoke about sharing with you, dear reader, a three-part homage to one of the biggest musical influences in my young life in Chicago—Booker T. & the M.G.’s. In Part 1, I touched on the first pair of tunes from the band that grabbed my attention and affected me for the…

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  • Booker T. & The M.G.’s: a Tribute to the Beatles

    A 12-year-old kid is at a local Woolworth’s store on Ashland Avenue on the South Side of Chicago. It’s the early ‘70s, and he’s spending his few allowance dollars on cheap “cut-out” vinyl albums, shelved at the front end of the checkout counter, neatly tiered, four rows high and ten albums deep. That twelve-year-old was…

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  • Groovin’ with Booker T. & the M.G.’s—beginning of an homage

    I was born in the ‘60s, a decade when records and radio waves were in perfect sync. You could hear every kind of music, at any time of day or night; all you had to do was cruise up and down the AM dial. We had a station in Chicago—WVON—that played great urban music. My…

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  • A stone-cold classic: Carole King’s Tapestry

    Barely in my teens, I listened to the very first albums I ever owned on a wide, floor-model stereo console placed prominently in the living room of my home on Chicago’s South Side. My oldest sister gave it to my mother as a birthday gift in September, 1971. It cost five hundred bucks and was…

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