When Aurora “Rory” Block was fourteen she was part of the Greenwich Village folk scene. She was introduced to the music of the Mississippi Delta by Stefan Grossman. She made it her business to learn directly from Mississippi John Hurt, the Reverend Gary Davis, Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bukka White and Skip James. She recorded for Elektra, RCA, Blue Goose, Chrysalis, Rounder, Rykodisc and Telarc. Block signed with Stony Plain Records in 2008 and started her “Mentor Series” paying tribute to those six Delta Blues masters that she met in person and who deeply influenced her. During her career Block has recorded thirty-eight albums, won 7 Blues Music Awards, and has received thirty Blues Music Award nominations.
In 2018 Block started a new series for Stony Plain honoring the “Power Women of the Blues” by releasing “A Woman’s Soul: A Tribute to Bessie Smith”; resulting in her winning her sixth Blues Music Award as 2019’s “Acoustic Artist of the Year”. On “Prove It On Me” Block “decided to celebrate some of the great female artists who were not as well-known as Bessie Smith with the obvious exception of Ma Rainey and Memphis Minnie” and introduces us to “women who got lost in the rewriting of a musical history that figuratively buried some of the best female singers of the 1920’s and ‘30’s”. The album is co-produced by Block and her husband Rob Davis.
Heralded as “a living landmark” (Berkeley Express), “a national treasure” (Guitar Extra), and “one of the greatest living acoustic blues artists” (Blues Revue), Rory Block has committed her life and her career to preserving the Delta blues tradition and bringing it to life for 21st century audiences around the world. A traditionalist and an innovator at the same time, she wields a fiery and haunting guitar and vocal style that redefines the boundaries of acoustic blues and folk. The New York Times declared: “Her playing is perfect, her singing otherworldly as she wrestles with ghosts, shadows and legends.”