Damn right I’ve got the blues!

A couple of weeks ago there was just nothing I wanted to hear on Sirius, so I started scanning around and found the Blues channel. Rebekah asked, with surprise, “You like the blues?!” Damn right I like the blues – I’ve just been so busy ensuring my kids have a proper grounding in the essentials of rock ‘n’ roll, to the point they can spontaneously sing every single word of “Tombstone Blues,” that I’ve forgotten to expose them to any more of the blues than they get from repeated watchings of “The Blues Brothers.” But yes, there was a time when it was all blues, all the time in our house – huge quantities of John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, “Gatemouth” Brown, the incredible John Hammond, and more. In fact, we refer to 1991 as The Year of Buddy Guy, the year this solid bluesman who had been playing for 30 years became something of an overnight sensation and was suddenly playing, it seemed, everywhere.

So, her question and seeing Buddy’s amazing performance in “Shine A Light” suddenly brought the blues back, and I’m busy ripping my blues CDs onto the computer and making room on the iPod. (I once played absolutely nothing but Small Faces for about a month, prompting a roommate to confide that she had really preferred my Left Banke period.) When I get into something, I get into it deep. so it may be before long that the family is looking back with longing at my intense Joe Cocker phase from early this summer. I’m just sayin’.