By Dr. Barry Lee Pearson
Bowling Green, the county seat of Caroline County, Virginia, lies some 90 miles southwest of Washington, D.C., on U.S. Highway 301. “Bowling Green” John Cephas lives in a house he built himself in the rural community of Woodford, five miles outside Bowling Green. Over the years his life has been divided between Woodford and Washington, where he was born [on September 4, 1930] and where he worked as a carpenter until retiring in 1987. Today, when not on the road playing the blues, he tinkers with his cars, boats, and tractors, and pursues the life of a gentleman farmer.
Cephas’ music derives primarily from two formidable African American institutions, the church and the country house party. His father owned a guitar, but his earliest inspiration and instruction came from his aunt, Lillian Dixon, who, along with her friend Haley Dorsey, introduced him to the blues. Cephas’ grandfather, John Dudley, first exposed him to rural nightlife and country “breakdowns,” teaching him songs that were then favorites on the house party circuit and are still in his repertoire today. His other primary teacher was his cousin, David Talliaferro, one of the best guitar players in Caroline County.
Cephas had given up performing in the late 1960s, but a chance encounter with Alabama pianist Wilbur “Big Chief” Ellis rekindled his interest. Cephas and Ellis met harmonica player Phil Wiggins at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 1976 and, together with bassist James Bellamy, formed the Barrelhouse Rockers. Ellis moved back to Alabama less than a year later, however, and died there in 1977. Since then Cephas and Wiggins have carried on as a duo, quickly earning a reputation as the top acoustic blues act in the Southeast. John Cephas received a National Heritage Award in 1989 in recognition of his musical talent, his teaching efforts, and his determination to keep the Piedmont blues tradition in the public eye. He continues to participate in workshops and other public presentations and serves as a board member for the National Council for the Traditional Arts.
Like Cephas, Phil Wiggins is a Washington, D.C., native [he was born her on May 8, 1954]. A self-taught harmonica player, he learned from community traditions and from listening to records of harmonica legends Sonny Terry, Little Walter, and Sonny Boy Williamson II. His highly vocal harmonica style also draws on his grandmother’s old-fashioned lined-out hymns and on the style of Washington guitar evangelist Flora Molton, with whom he worked off and on until 1976. His style merges the soulfulness of church vocals with the good-tie sound of house party blues. Today, he and Cephas enjoy worldwide recognition as the lading exponents of the Piedmont or East Coast blues tradition that embraces the style of Blind Boy Fuller, Gary Davis, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee.
As far back as I can trace my family’s existence was that my family most likely came up the Rappahannock River as slaves, and they were disembarked at Port Royal. Most of the black people in this area, this is where they came from. And they were sold into slavery in Caroline County, Spotsylvania County, and farther south of here. And then they settled mostly in the Norfolk area where my great-great-great-great-grandfather was a slave, and then later, after the Emancipation Proclamation, he was given the 40 acres and a mule. The mule is dead, but the lad that was given to the family is still intact over there. I grew up in a segregated society, to everybody in the community; they were so close that we almost were considered family although we might not have been birth kin. But it was just like one big family and what influenced me came out of this community I was raised in.
I was born in Washington, D.C., in what is known as Foggy Bottom. That was supposed to be a bad part of town at that time, but that was a real good experience. During that period of time, I think that families were much closer together and you lived in neighborhoods where everybody knew everybody. In contrast, today it’s very different because I don’t care where you live, everybody’s strangers. But we were all one big happy family. A lot of my relatives lived nearby in the same neighborhood and they visited each other’s houses. We shared music together. It was so much that we shared together.
When I was young, seven or eight years old, my mother taught me and my brother Ernest how to sing. We were a duet. She brought us up and would rehearse us during the week, during the daytime. My father was out working for one of the construction companies, and my mother used to have us practicing. And boy, when I used to hit them bad notes or didn’t sing in tune, my mother used to whap us. My mother . . . she really taught me about how to sing, how to use your voice. So we sang in the church under the direction of my mother for years, until I got up to about ten or twelve years old.
When I was eight or nine years old, my aunt Lillian introduced me to the blues. She had a boyfriend named Haley Dorsey and he was very good at playing the guitar. He used to come to the house and spent time with my aunt and every time he would come around he would bring his guitar. I was attracted to that sound, that blues, you know, when I was young. Aunt Lillian, she was a guitar player herself. So I used to listen to her and Haley play the blues. Blues was around the house all the time. Sometimes she would play the guitar and I would stand there, so young I wasn’t even realizing what I was hearing, but I was so fascinated with it. And my aunt knew that I was interested. So even at that early age she would give me the guitar and her spare time she would try to show me how to play. I was always asking her, “Will you show me how to do this?” And she would show me different chords on the guitar. And I did learn a few chords and it kind of just always stuck with me. I was always trying to pick out something on the guitar.
My real inspiration in life was my grandfather, John Dudley. He was quite the guy. He was always respected in the community as one who was really cheerful, as one who could really sing, one who would like to party. Almost everybody knew him and knew him as a person that on the weekends, that there was going to be a party where there’s going to be plenty food, plenty to drink, and plenty good times. Yeah. That was my grandfather. He taught me the song about Going Down the Road Feeling Bad, taught me about Railroad Bill. Then he used to play a lot of those songs like Hand Me Down My Walking Cane. Oh man, there were so many songs. And then he used to sing like the barbershop songs, Oh I Wander Today From the Hills, Maggie, to Watch the City Below, songs like that. The Old Mill Stream and songs of that nature that they would barbershop on. We used to do all that together. Get all the family, my mother and my aunt, my brother, my father, and we used to sing all those songs.
[My grandfather] was a guitar player, a gambler, a ladies’ man. And sometimes I’ve been associated with being the sole heir of John Dudley. When I was young, he used to come around to the house in Foggy Bottom and say, “Hey, boy, come on. I’m going down the road. I want to take you with me.” We used to go down in Virginia. My grandfather used to get us and take us down to the country together and show me all about where my roots were. Show me my cousins, our homeplace and where he was born. And I was really impressed by that. He loved those country breakdowns and he used to have them at his house. As a matter of fact, I had a cousin named Jim Henry Coleman from down in Virginia used to make liquor. So my grandfather used to sell liquor and he used to drink it too I think the very first drink of liquor that I took in my life my grandfather kind of oversaw that. I was with him at my cousin Jim Henry’s house and he had some of that still liquor. I was just a young fellow, but I remember he and my brother and all of us were together. My grandfather told me, he would say, “Boy, you got to start. You got to cut your teeth, boy, and be a man.” He would say, “You won’t be a man until you can drink this. You got to stand up and drink it like a man.” So he gave me some of that stuff and that stuff liked to kill me. Yeah, he was the kind of guy that introduced me to all those things: corn liquor, music, country parties, and all those good times.
I can remember they would have house parties and they would send us upstairs to bed. All the kids would be upstairs and they would be partying downstairs. A lot of times you couldn’t go to sleep for all of the music and frolicking that was going on. But we weren’t participants. That didn’t come until later years when they kind of loosened the reins on you. You know, the older people used to have the reins on you. They wouldn’t expose you to too much of what they were doing during that time. But I would hear the sound in my ear, you know. The words that they were singing and how they would be affected by it. And it kind of affected me in the same way. Even though I was going to church I always had that aspiration to go there to be with that other crowd. Of course the people in the church, especially my mother, kind of frowned upon that even though they were doing the same thing. They would go to church on Sunday, but on those Friday and Saturday nights they would gather at each others’ houses for those country breakdowns and hoedowns where they dance and drink corn liquor and just have a good time.
I grew up in a religious home. My father was a Baptist minister and all of my young years, even before I was attracted to the blues, I was always encouraged to play religious music. If I’m interested in music, this was the way to go. As I grew up, and when they found out that I was kind of interested in blues, man, they say: “This is the wrong way to go. Don’t go to the houses of ill repute.” But whenever they would party like on the weekends, Fridays or Saturdays when other people would come over, the first thing they would say was, “John, go get your guitar and come out and play a few numbers for some of the people here in the house.” And they would partake of the blues too. But they would always encourage me: “No, no don’t do this, don’t do this, please don’t do this.” But I didn’t look at it like that. A lot of times they say, “Oh God, this is Satan’s music. This is devil’s music. Those people are getting drunk and they’re down in there having a good time with women and they’re doing all these things of ill repute. For God’s sake, don’t do this.” But when the band struck up, they was right there.
My father bought a guitar. So at that time I had already been exposed to the blues. I was actually playing a little bit of open-key stuff and slide that he didn’t know anything about. So he bought himself a guitar and he used to hide it in the closet and he wouldn’t allow me to touch it. But every time that he would leave, I’d go to the closet and get his guitar and I’d play it. Almost every time he would inevitably catch me, or know that I had been fooling with it, and give me a licking over it. One way he used to catch me, a couple of times I’d break a string on there. And I got where I could tie them back up and tighten it back up. And he’d go and look, see the string tied up and say, “Oh, you’ve had the guitar.” So I got many a thrashing over the guitar. So one day I had been after his guitar again and he just told me, “Well, I can’t stop you and I’m getting tired of whipping you. It don’t look like I’m ever going to be able to play it, so I’m going to give it to you. Here’s the guitar if you want to play it.” That gave e a chance to play it as much as I wanted, after he almost killed me trying to keep me from playing it. And I really went for broke then, because I didn’t have to be ashamed of it or try to hide it.
I learned John Henry in open tuning, what we called Sebastopol. In fact, that’s the first way I learned to play guitar was in Sebastopol, because once you tune it up you didn’t have to finger too much. You just have to like play on the dots of the guitar and you make plenty good music, or use a slide. I mean, I used to just take one string, and strung it up on a board or somehow. I’ll tell you what they used to use a lot: when they used to make them brooms, a broom had wire around the top of it, take that wire off the broom when they throw that broom away and string it up on something, put a bridge on the bottom and slide up and down to change key. I used to play in open tuning then because I didn’t know too much about how to tune it up. But I could tune open tunings, or I’d get somebody to tune it up for me to play in standard tuning. I didn’t start really participating at those house parties until I was a teenager. At least I didn’t start drinking corn liquor until I was about 14 years old. Then I kind of got more exposed to the intricacies of it, the real lowdown blues. Every chance I would get I would try to go down where they were playing the blues and dancing. It just came naturally to me. Blues drew me like a magnet. It was part of me, part of my heritage, part of my soul.
The families had no other place to go. In the black community, wherever they lived, all the black people, they were there together. And what they would do is that on the weekends, my cousin lived right down the road from me. Another cousin live right down the road from me; my brother and sister live right down the road from me. We would congregate at one of the family members’ houses. And that’s where we would have our fun. That’s where we have our house parties, you know. And it was so integral and it was so family-oriented that almost every weekend, everybody would be wherever the party was. And the blues was just a medium that kind of drew them together. That wasn’t the only thing that drew them together. Just being in a segregated society, for survival, drew the black people together.
So on weekends we’d gather together at somebody’s house. A lot of them were primitive instruments they would play. Homemade. Somebody might have a guitar that he had made. He might have some percussion instrument that he made. He might have some bones or spoons. And then they did have store-bought instruments, but they weren’t of good quality. But anything that a guy could make music from, if he was just beating on top of a can or pan or either a washtub string band. They used just about anything you could think of to make instruments. In later [years], they were able to buy instruments. Saxophones, guitars, banjos, fiddles, and what have you. We had one guy that was really good on the banjo, Harold Hill. He inspired a lot of guys to play the banjo. He could pick it or claw- hammer it either one. I played with banjo players. I even tried to play banjo myself. I could play it a little bit. I started to buy one a little while ago. But the banjo is so expensive now I don’t know if I want one or not.
I had a cousin named David Talliaferro who was a great influence on me. He was six or seven years older than me and he was one hell of a guitar player. I’ll tell you the truth, David was the best guitar player around, the best in Caroline County, Virginia, maybe all of Virginia. Didn’t nobody fool around with David Talliafero. But he was just a country boy and never got exposure. He died about 25 years ago. But he really taught me a lot, I’d say 80 percent of what I know on the guitar. He just played those raw blues. He taught me to play the thumb-and-finger style, like the other Piedmont guitar players do. We called that style the “Williamsburg Lope.” You know, trying to get the guitar to say what you want it to say while keeping the rhythm behind it. I used to sit for hours on end just proposal and singing to myself, trying to get that three-finger style of picking. When I first discovered I had it, man, that was an experience. I think I went out and got plastered. Once I got that, I started feeling comfortable with the guitar. I could sit down and play what I wanted and it sounded like I wanted it to sound. David and I kind of teamed up and we would go around together on the weekends and play at parties or just about any affair on that house-to-house circuit. And the more I played, the better I got.
David was the best I worked with back then… if he would play. He wouldn’t play unless you gave him something to drink. Then in order to keep playing, he’d have to have something more to drink, and then soon he’d get drunk and then he couldn’t play anymore. Well, I guess that’s characteristic of a lot of other blues players. Of course, back then I had quite a tolerance for alcohol. I could drink David under the table and still be going strong. Of course, I’m paying for it now. But back then we would just play music and drink corn liquor. Man, I’ve drunk so much of it, I’m going to tell you the truth, it used to run out of my ears.
Then I had another cousin, John Woolfolk, and sometimes he would go around and play with us. And he had a sister who could play too, and she used to give house parties. In this part of Virginia certain people were noted for having gatherings at their houses. On place in particular was my cousin’s, Christine Woolfolk. She used to have something almost every weekend. It was just like going to a juke joint. Christine used to fool around with the guitar. She would just do it in fun and frolic. She might say: “Give me that guitar. Let me play; learn to this.” She might do one number and that’s it or something like that. She wouldn’t want to get competitive. Absolutely note. It wasn’t proper for a woman to do that.
Even here in D.C. they would have rent parties and have entertainers, somebody playing the guitar. That would raw a lot of people. But we never made any money, just all we could eat and drink. When I got older and started working, I still preferred to be down in the country even though it’s a long drive back and forth to Washington. I must have driven that 301 highway a million times, because even years ago I would head for the country on the weekends. I don’t think I can remember a weekend when I got off work on Friday evening that I didn’t have somewhere to go. See, everything started on Friday and kept on just whole weekend. Man I couldn’t wait to get out of town.
Out in the country everybody knew everybody, so you knew what you could do and what you couldn’t do. So it wasn’t much of a problem. Of course, there used to be a fight every now and then. Like if somebody gets jealous because he thinks somebody else is shooting at his woman. I tell you, them guys used to be aggressive, particularly about the girls. Yeah, that’s what most of them get to fighting about, them girls. Especially after you get a little high, you know, and the music gets jumping and you’re dancing on the floor. You better not dance with nobody else’s woman too long. And not too many times. And maybe one of those women was cheating on somebody. Well, they used to fight and cut, shoot each other over that.
And sometimes the parties used to get turned out. If you weren’t involved in it, you just pick up your stuff and go over to somebody else’s place. And then I’ve been to parties where I’ve been involved in actually fighting. We started fighting maybe one or two o’clock. If somebody that’s a friend of mine gets in a fight, we fight all night long or fight until everybody gets too tired and go home. Yeah, get black and blue and bloody if one of those free-for-alls starts. Boy, I’ll tell you, back in the country things could get rough. Everybody gets steamed up drinking that corn liquor and someone starts fighting. I’ve been in free-for-alls where everybody would be fighting and nobody knows who’s fighting who. Breaking all the windows out, tearing the door down. I’ve been to quite a few of those. But all that’s faded out. Mainly, I guess, because black people have become more affluent now and they’re involved in so many other things. They’re free to travel and to go where they want to. They have a little bit of money now and there’s no need for a house party because their lifestyle has absolutely just changed.
Drinking and staying up all night long kind of got to me after a while. We would play those old juke joints and be on the road all the weekend, going from place to place, and I got tired of that. And then there was the headaches from some of those bad weekends when you drink too much. So I just gave up playing the guitar altogether. I didn’t want to play any more music. I didn’t want to play guitar for about five or six years. As a matter of fact, I played at a party one night and left my guitar and I didn’t go back to get it. That was in the late ‘60s.
Then one night I went out to a birthday party. A girlfriend invited me to this party. I hadn’t played for a long time. So I went there, but I didn’t take a guitar. There was a guy she introduced me to. His name was Big Chief Ellis. She introduced us and told me that he was a well-known blues piano player. And she told him, “Chief, John plays the guitar.” So he and I just started talking and what have you. Well, the same evening the hostess of the party said, “Say, John, why don’t you get your guitar so Chief can hear you play?” I said, “Oh, shucks, I don’t feel like fooling with no guitar.” But then Chief said, “Man, why don’t you go on and get your guitar. I’d like to hear you play.” So then I said, “Okay,” and I went home and got my guitar and brought it back. All the people were sitting around in there and they wanted to hear blues. So I struck up a few tunes. Chief said, “Man, you play a mean guitar. Boy, you can really play that thing.” I said, “Well, I’d like to hear you play sometime.” So then the girl that had the party said, “You know, I’ve got a piano downstairs in the basement. Why don’t you guys go down there and hook up a little bit.”
Chief and I agreed and went downstairs. And, boy, when he started playing the piano, I said, “Man, this guy is ready!” He was playing the blues. Stuff that I love, like Walter Davis. And believe me, when I heard them, it was rebirth. So we played and all the people that was upstairs came downstairs. I guess it was about ten o’clock when we hooked up and we played until the next morning at daybreak. Straight through. We was drinking and having a heck of a time.
So Chief told me, “Man, I’ve been looking for a guitar player like you.” He started telling me about some of the things he was doing, playing festivals and all, and asked if I would come and play with him. At first I told him I wasn’t interested. But he would call me everyday to ask me to come over to his house and pay. I can never forget, I used to try to duck Chief sometimes. I wouldn’t answer the phone because I thought it was Chief telling me to come and play, and I didn’t want to get involved with playing. Finally, I started going over to his house in the evenings, and me and him would play. I was really catching on to what he was doing, and we got it together and made a good connection. Then I went out and played a few festivals with Chief and then people started to hearing me and Chief playing. And then we started getting gigs and more gigs. And I was almost just eased back into it, you know. I’d never played really for money until I had met Big Chief Ellis. And really I was unaware that people were interested in that blues type of music I was playing, that black man’s country folks music. So Chief and I, we played together for about five or six years, traveling around to different places. Big Chief played that old barrelhouse piano, which was unique because very few people can make the piano roll the way he could. And I’ll tell you, it really went good with the type of blues guitar that I played.
In 1976 we were playing at the American Folklife Festival in D.C., down on the Mall. That’s where we met Phil Wiggins, who was playing with Flora Molton, a gospel singer out of Washington, D.C. I was playing with Big Chief. We had Johnny Shines, Sonny Rhodes, and other blues musicians there. So in between one of our breaks, we were planning on having a jam session after we were off stage. And we heard playing that harp, Chief and I. So we kind of conspired. I was telling Chief, “Man, the way that guy plays that harp, we ought to try to talk that guy into coming and joining us.” So Chief say, “Yeah, we ought to do it.” So Phil agreed. Then we started off with a group called the Barrelhouse Rockers. It was four of us; Chief, James Bellamy on bass, Phil on harmonica, and me on the guitar. I guess we played together until, I think it was 1977. Chief had a heart attack down in Birmingham, down in his home. He went home, I guess for his final rest, he went back home and died.
I would still get calls from people to come and do a gig just by myself. So I did a couple of gigs, but I kind of felt uneasy. I just wasn’t really into it. So I asked Phil, “Why don’t you come and we do a couple gigs together.” So Phil agreed and we really had a good, tight sound together. So then we started getting a little notoriety as a duo and we just progressed until the present day. Over the last 20 years we’ve played just about any place you could imagine. We’ve been all over the country. We’ve been all over the European community too. Scandinavia, Germany, France… we’ve been all over Africa and South America for the Arts America program. We’ve been to the Soviet Union and China, Mongolia and Australia. So I guess you could say we’ve been all over the world playing. I’d still go anywhere to play the blues and to teach people about Piedmont blues. But I think it takes a certain kind of person to handle the aggravation of being on the road so much. It’s definitely a strain. I mean, we’ve been on the road so long that I keep a bag packed all the time. When I come home, I just take out all the dirty clothes and put in some other clothes and set my bag by the door.
I like all kinds of music, and if I like it I try to learn it. I used to listen to Merle Travis a lot, and I learned quite a few of his songs and some of his techniques, some of his style – and Skip James, Blind Boy Fuller, Gary Davis. I first heard Skip James on recordings and the minute I heard him I was just drawn into his repertoire. I mean, he was so different and the music was so eerie, so bluesy, the minute I heard it I was drawn into it. But I’ll play everything from gospel to country and western. Phil and I try to give the audience different styles in our shows: ragtime, lowdown blues, more uptempo stuff. But basically, we stay close to the Piedmont sound because that’s our roots.
PHIL WIGGINS
I’ve been into music ever since I can remember. My mother and my father collected piano music. Fats Waller and Earl “Fatha” Hines, Meade Lux Lewis, and all that kind of stuff. That’s one of my memories, just sitting around on the floor of my mother’s room and listening to these records. When the mood hit we’d all get together and not really eat popcorn, but it seemed like that. Just gathering around and being real relaxed and just enjoying listening to the records. Sit around and listen to them and look at the jackets. I can still picture this Meade Lux Lewis jacket where he’s sitting at a blue piano and he’s got a blue suit and a blue derby.
When I got into harmonica, it was just something I wanted to play. I wanted to get involved in it and it just happened. I have to say that one of the main things, when I first picked up the harmonica when I was a kid, the cost of it was a big factor. Because, you know, it was an instrument I could afford on my paper route money. But I always liked the saxophone and the harmonica. I think they have a similar kind of sound and range. I always liked the way the harmonica could be so expressive. You know you can shape sound almost like your voice. It’s so directly hooked to your feelings and your emotions.
When I first started playing harmonica, the only harp player that I’d really heard of was Sonny Terry. And I listened to a little of his stuff. My mother had a couple of Sonny Terry albums. A couple years later I heard of Little Walter and he really influenced me. Then later on Sonny Boy Williamson. Mainly, you know, I just drew from people that I’d jam with on a person-to-person basis. I learned as much from guitar players and piano, you know, even more than other harp players. My first person-to-person influence was Flora Molton. She was a street singer here, and I’d been seeing her all my life. Then when I was a freshman in high school, I went out to her house one day with a friend of mine and started jamming with her and then playing on a more regular basis. She sang only gospel and spirituals. I like gospel and listen to it all I can, you know. Blues and gospel, one influences the other.
A lot of people ask me how I got into it and I think how it really got into my blood was when I used to spend a lot of summers with my grandmother down in my parents’ hometown, Trussville, Alabama, outside of Birmingham, and hear my grandmother’s church. The church yard is right in her back yard. And when I was younger I used to walk her just right around the corner on Thursday or Friday nights when they would have prayer meetings. I would stand outside the church and listen while the elder women of the church were holding the prayer meetings. And they would do what they call lining hymns, where one person, and that’s usually my grandmother, would lead them. She would sing a verse and the women in the congregation would answer back sort of like a chorus. And that was one of the most emotional and really one of the most powerful and bluesy sounds I ever heard.
I think they both use the call-and-response thing, blues and religious music. And I think it affects the melody. Singing the blues is just like speaking, the way it’s phrased and stuff, and I think that’s also true in gospel music, at least the way my grandmother sang it. It was like it wasn’t really nailed down in a musical sense. It was more the way she would speak it. That’s what dictated how she sang it that way, you know, what it was about and how she sang it.
I played with Flora at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 1976, and then I got to meet some of the people who had influenced me off records like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Johnny Shines. I got tight with Johnny Shines, and he introduced me to Chief Ellis and that’s where I first met John [Cephas]. We played all kinds of blues and other kinds of music too, country, ragtime, you name it. I’ve worked with electric bands and can play a more Chicago style, but really we like to stick more to our acoustic sound. It’s more of our own local tradition.
When I first heard this music I didn’t think of it as traditional music. I just thought of it as good music. A lot of popular music now has become real high-tech and it’s been that way for a while, and I think that a lot of those gimmicks are played out. I think hat now people are reaching back for a more natural sound because in a way it’s kind of a new thing to the kids. I think too that a lot of young PEOPLE, specifically in the black community, are trying to get reconnected with their history and what their roots were. I notice that in some of the current hip-hop bands that they’re making reference to blues. So that’s one reason why people are looking back to the original stuff. A lot of people talk about it like it’s in the past, but we still get together and play at parties and people will still dance to the stuff we play. There’s a lot of harp players around her and we get together and trade licks and learn from each other, compete a little and try to cut each other. Those parties and contests, I think that kind of environment caused the music to develop in such a way that it’s strong enough to survive so that people can still hear it and pick up on it and enjoy it. And the thing I really like is when we play at parties, like when Aunt Lillian had a birthday, and people are really partying and dancing to the music. That’s what I really like more than sitting in a club where people are sitting down listening to it. People forget that a lot of the tunes we do are dance tunes, party tunes.
It’s real powerful music because of where it came from and what its use was. It came from the black community and was born during hard times like for parties, for good times, and it’s good dance music. I mean blues is nourishment for the human spirit. The blues is good for you because at the time it was created, the human spirit was under attack. And so it was really needed. And it’s still there. I just think that people need to hear it.
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Dr. Barry Lee Pearson, Professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland, stands as the most steadfast supporter of the local acoustic blues scene in the greater Washington, D.C., area and beyond. As a musician, author, college lecturer, folklorist, and personal friend to the musicians, he has been the voice of this regional and national blues scene.