On Labor Day 2018 the famed Pakistani Truck Painter Haider Ali painted one of my guitars -- it was an amazing afternoon.

All made possible by Mark Richardson! 

This year marks the 35th anniversary of "Somethin' Gotta Be Arranged," a film about Rhode Island country-blues guitarist Paul Geremia, created as a student project by Geoff Adams.

I recently interviewed Geoff about the film and it was the featured segment of the November 12, 2018, edition of Blue Monday, WFHB's long-running blues radio show. (Here is the film on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WPkw42L97Aw   ~18 minutes -- More links below.)

Before the interview, I played two brief audio clips from the film.  In…

M Cooper Harriss and I often have great discussions about the intersections of race and literature and music.  Many of those conversations are over beer and wine in pubs and living rooms, but we have been fortunate enough to capture some of them on the air -- often as part of my monthly DJ slot on WFHB’s  Blue Monday, the radio show devoted to contemporary and classic blues. Past on-air conversations were about Zora Neale Hurston and Bob Dylan. This time the impetus was Cooper's new book, Ralph Ellison's…

Bessie Smith was the featured artist on my March 2, 2018, Blue Monday radio show on WFHB.  Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, about 1894, Bessie played on the street with her brother and then joined the Ma Rainey traveling show sometime in the early 1920s. 

After Mamie Smith’s (no relation) Crazy Blues  became a massive hit in 1920, talent scouts searched for more female blues artists and indeed they found some great ones: not only Rainey (“The Mother of the Blues”) but her amazing protégé, Bessie Smith…

The featured artist for my WFHB Blue Monday DJ slot on Monday, February, 12, 2018, was Jimmy Reed, the deeply influential Mississippi-Chicago bluesman, who was born in 1925 in the Delta and died in California in 1976. Reed was an active musician in the Chicago area and had many R&B -- and a few pop -- hit songs in the 1950s and 1960s.

Many peoples’ first encounter with Chicago blues -- any kind of blues -- is through songs Reed wrote and recorded. Many of these songs were in turn covered (in his life…