780 Paul Butterfield Blues Band “Mystery Train” 1965

Louis Myers, blues guitarist: “this kid, this Paul Butterfield, white boy playin’ harp, he play pretty good, he play well enough to play as good as Junior, on some things, you know. But now I had been minglin’ with this kid all the time, this Paul Butterfield. I caught him when he was playin’ down in Old town. I used to go down there and sit in with him, on the guitar, but they never undertaken that I could play harmonica. Most of the majority of peoples didn’t know I played harp, you know. Till this drummer, Sam Lay, told him that I played harp too, so finally one night he told me to sit in on the harp. I guess he was huntin’ sounds, you know? Most of these cats hunt sounds” (Jim O’Neal, Amy Van Singel, The Voice of the Blues, 2013).

Paul Butterfield Blues Band “Mystery Train”

779 Paul Butterfield Blues Band “Born in Chicago” 1965

“Michael Bernard Bloomfield was born on July 28, 1943, as the son of affluent Jewish parents and grew up in Gencoe, a suburb of Chicago. After receiving a transistor radio for his bar mitzvah, he listened to rockabilly and the blues on southern radio stations and eventually began to join African American blues musicians on Chicago’s South Side on stage where the audience received the white blues guitarist as a novelty act” (Ulrich Adelt, Blues Music in the Sixties: A Story in Black and White, 2010). 

Paul Butterfield Blues Band “Born in Chicago”

778 Solomon Burke (1940-2010) “Got to Get You Off My Mind” 1965

“An extremely influential pioneer of classic, Gospel-rooted soul music with nearly two dozen chart hits for Atlantic Records between 1961 and 1969, the King of Rock ‘n’ Soul was born in a Philadelphia church loft on March 21, 1940, and...was a choir soloist—which, with his powerful voice and charismatic personality, quickly led to his own radio program, Solomon’s Temple, and frequent stage appearances billed as The Wonder Boy Preacher” (Gary von Tersch, Sing Out!, Nov. 2010). 

Solomon Burke “Got to Get You Off My Mind”

777 James Brown (1933-2006) “I Got You (I Feel Good)” 1965

“It happened at a base [Vietnam], while we were doing our thing, and playing the music as loud as possible. Suddenly, all the shooting that was always going on in the background, just over the hills it seemed, stopped…The other side was enjoying our music just as much as our own boys” (James Brown, I Feel Good, 2005). 

James Brown “I Got You (I Feel Good)”

776 The Beatles “Yesterday” 1965

“McCartney has been thinking lately about pre-rock standards’ heavy influence on the Beatles’ songwriting—he and Lennon were already in their teens before they first heard Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. ‘We grew up watching Fred Astaire films, and then it was kind of swept aside by rock & roll, but we still have that influence…we were influenced by rock & roll—blues to some extent—but also, without knowing it, the melodic element of the Beatles, and some of the structural elements, came from the backs of our brains, which was this old stuff that our parents had sung’” (Brian Hatt, Rolling Stone, 2012). 

The Beatles “Yesterday”