The blog originates from a trip that 3 friends made along the Mississippi River in April 2010. This was a must-do journey that I had fantasised about for many years.
As a child of the sixties, I grew up on the pop culture of the time, listening to the Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, Kinks and many more. As I began to grow older and more discerning, I became bored with the pop music that had become such an important part of our culture and life and began to look to the music and musicians that influenced those groups. Many of us were doing this around the UK, listening to blues and folk music. I borrowed a record by this guy called John Mayall and nothing was the same again. I devoured blues music and found myself as part of that movement now known as the British Blues Revival.
Americans had almost forgotten their heritage, the bluesmen were just jobbing musicians earning a meagre living by playing to enthusiasts around America. I once heard BB King acknowledge that it was the British who rediscovered the Blues and re-established those blues legends. The subsequent American revival, that the British blues bands inspired by taking our blues back to the USA unearthed lost musicians such as Mississippi John Hurt.
Vibrant blues can still be heard in Delta but the communities are poor and deprived. Many of the older Bluesmen are dying out and with them those first hand histories and the living memories. Such a difference from the country music scene in Nashville where memories have been preserved and the past celebrated in every detail.
This is my attempt to keep the Blues alive and if all of us contribute to the process, then collectively a movement can keep those histories alive. This blog is about a very short experience in my life which changed the way that I listened to music and helped me to understand the significance of music in our human history and how we tell it form generation to generation.
Follow the journey, then follow the stories that I will tell!
