My Personal History of the Blues: part 1

April 15, 2010 by DaleR
Filed under: Blues History

I started playing guitar in 1964. I lived in Columbia, South Carolina and went downtown to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium on closed circuit television. I went out the next day and bought my first guitar. I took lessons and didn’t get to play a lot of the music that I wanted to learn but I was learning to play the guitar. At that time I wanted to be the next George Harrison.

About a year later, I moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina and played in a band that was not particularly good at what we were doing. We got a few gigs and then everyone kind of moved on to other things. I continued to play the guitar but no longer played in public. I owe a lot to the time I spent there because I was exposed to new types of music: James Brown, Otis Reading, Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, The Georgia Tamms, and a lot more.

I still focused on Rock and Roll music but was starting to become somewhat disillusioned with the genre. Groups like The Who were destroying instruments on stage and Jimmie Hendrix was setting guitars on fire. I couldn’t even afford a great guitar. I started to look in other directions.

I moved to Missouri and became aware of Peter, Paul and Mary, Simon and Garfunkel, and Bod Dylan. I became interested in some of the older country music and then, later people like Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Hank Williams, Junior. By the way, I still love this music. When my son was born, I sang “Mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys” to him almost every day.

One evening, I was dialing through radio stations and down on the end of the public radio section of the dial, I found the station owned by the University of Missouri at St. Louis. A man named Leroy Pearson, who went by the name of Baby Face Leroy II had a blues show and when I tuned in the station Elmore James was playing “Dust My Blues.” I was hooked.

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