Listening to the Blues

The Blues

Some of the first blues I heard was live performances of blues artists opening up for rock bands in the late 60's such as Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Buddy Guy and B.B. King. There was some blues being played on WMMR underground radio but not very much traditional blues. Most of what I heard was really filtered through the British blues revival. 

While I was in the Navy there were some guys, mostly black sailors, into the blues and played tapes onboard the ship. I liked hearing that music and I had already bonded with some of the black sailors over soul music and the fact that I was from Philadelphia. 

My real emersion in the blues was from listening to WMMR's Blues show every Saturday night. We were poor college students and often sat around the house on a Saturday night drinking beer, smoking pot and listening to the blues show. Learned a lot.

 Then we were buying a lot of blues compilation albums at the time. Over the years we built up a nice collection of classic blues.  Collected many blues anthologies from artists like Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin' Wolf, Mississippi John Hurt, Willie Dixon, Lightin' Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Albert King, Koko Taylor, and on and on.

Started collecting younger blues players like Taj Mahal, R.L. Burnside, Keb Mo and so many more.

In the 80's and 90's we were collecting the various Smithsonian compilations including their Classic Blues Vol. 1 and 2 which were both multidisc sets. By the 90's I was buying blues CDs and then later downloaded plenty of compilations. We now have a very extensive blues collection.