Blues Guitarist Albert Cummings at the Tangiers

Brevard Music Group presents blues guitarist Albert Cummings at The Tangiers.

Cummings first began playing the five-string banjo at the age of twelve. He started to learn basic chords and progressions, and went on to become a fan of bluegrass music. In his late teens, he encountered the early recordings of Stevie Ray Vaughan. While in college, in 1987, he saw Vaughan perform. His first public guitar performance was in 1997 when he played at his friend’s wedding reception. In Cummings’ late twenties, he formed a band, Swamp Yankee. In 1999, he released an independently produced album, The Long Way. The trio spent two hours in a recording studio to record the nine songs for the album.

After the release, the band went on the Northeast blues circuit. In 1998, he walked into a Northeast Blues Society open jam. In 1999, the musician competed in the Blues Foundation’s International Blues Challenge, in Memphis. The following year, he released his debut recording.  On April 8, 2022, Cummings released 10, a 13-track Ivy Music Company album produced by Grammy Award-winning producer Chuck Ainlay. Simply described as “the blues rocker’s gone country”, it features discovered depth and complexity within a new style, according to a review published by Blues Rock Review.