Page 58 - Blues Festival Guide Magazine 2022

Streaming the Blues

By Tom Andrews of performances and interviews and, of course, the audio to
My path to the blues has been a somewhat circuitous immerse you in the music. I’ve been hooked ever since.
journey. From the foothills of the Ozarks in northcentral Over the last few years, spending so much more time
Arkansas to the beautiful Mississippi Gulf Coast, music has at home due to the pandemic, I’ve had the opportunity to
been my constant companion. dig in and enjoy some blues documentaries I’d like to share
In the late 1940s to early ‘50s, we would sit around my with you. To me, documentaries are history lessons and hold
aunt’s crank-up Victrola and listen to the popular music of the great importance, because without knowing the history of the
day – Hank Williams, Ernest Tubbs, Eddy Arnold and so on. It genre, you will never be able to truly understand what the
wasn’t till the mid-‘50s, when we moved to a small cotton town blues is all about.
in southeastern Arkansas, that my blues education began.
In the tiny, dusty town of Dermott, AR, the only outlet
for entertainment was radio. At night, my brother, cousin
and I would sit up with a small flashlight under the sheets in
our tiny bedroom and listen to the sounds of WLAC, one of
those 50,000-watt AM clear channel stations that you could
pick up on the skip as far away as the Caribbean. Names
like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and B.B. King became
familiar to us from DJs like Gene Nobles and Big John R.
(a.k.a John Richbourg).
My father owned movie theaters, and in 1955 we moved
to Biloxi, MS. Most often, my brother, Dad and I lived in small
one-room apartments in the back of the theater. I became the
projectionist, my brother sold tickets and popcorn and Dad THE BLUES TRAIL REVISITED
handled the business end of things.
I began to discover there were movies and documentaries In 1971, newly minted filmmaker Ted Reed traveled from
out there that were a great way to learn more about the history Rochester, NY, to the Mississippi Delta to record the sounds
behind the blues and its musicians – providing rich accounts and stories of famous and not-so-famous blues artists. This
of their lives, glimpses of what drove the musicians and documentary, The Blues Trail Revisited, is a record of Reed’s
songwriters, where their inspirations came from, short videos return visit 50 years later.

56 Blues Festival Guide 2022