Salt Lake City Blues Jam

02/09/2025

Willie Dixon : I heard Bo Diddley playing in the streets lots of times. He had a little band that would go from corner to corner, set up and start playing. We'd see him all over the place and one day somebody brought him into the studio. He did this song, "I'm A Man" and kept developing it.

I played bass on some of Bo Diddley's first sessions. He came there with one fellow playing bass but that guy didn't have enough firepower in his bass. I knew Bo had a very good rhythmic style and this gave him the thing to emphasize. When you hear a guy come up with a beat like "Boom da boom da boom, da boom boom," right out of nowhere, it's going to attract your attention.

The drums have always been giving messages. In slavery times, they didn't allow black people to tap or drum on wooden things because they could talk the message of rhythms. That's why Bo Diddley always carries this particular pattern. The drums are speaking and he'll tell you what the drums are saying.

24/08/2025

Little Milton : Every guitar player has tried at one time or another to sound like T-Bone Walker, and that bars none BB King, yours truly, you name 'em. To me he set a style and example that there's no way you could play the so-called progressive Blues without touching, somewhere in there, T-Bone Walker. I just don't think it can be done. It's like a trumpet player trying to play a trumpet and trying not to play a note of Louis Armstrong or WC Handy. It's literally impossible. He was the first guy to play single note solos, he used those Jazz chords, and his guitar accompanied his voice. He literally made the guitar sing to me, and talk to me. And most of the guitar players of that era were just chording, playing back-beat bass and stuff like that. I don't mean that they weren't that great, but his stuff spoke to me in a more sophisticated way. I been classified as a blues guitarist, blues singer, which is fine with me, 'cause the music I've done, I've loved it and I still do.

And they can call me anything they want as long as they don't call me late for dinner. But I've always had a thing about standing on a stage doing a full night of doing nothing but 12-bar blues - that would bore me. And T-Bone's style, or people like Percy Mayfield that did different things, that meant I could let myself out into different pastures.

When I finally got a chance to play with T-Bone I was thrilled to death. And I tell you, the day I was scheduled to meet him, I got there real early to make sure I'd see him. There was him and his chauffeur in this big Cadillac and man, you would have thought I was a woman waiting for a man that she admired to show up, I was just so excited! We had big laughs about different things, we set in the dressing room and got the guitars, and he showed me several things, and we really got to know each other. A few years later we got to be very decent friends. And he was a very intelligent guy. Some people, they think that all blues entertainers has got to be... non-educated, semi-educated, filthy, raggety, evil, broken-hearted, living in poverty, that they live the life they sing about. This is not true. This is definitely not true, this is a wrong concept.

29/06/2025

Buddy Guy was one of the first guitarists to use electronic feedback and distortion. Now, at age 88, he has a cameo in Ryan Coogler's supernatural horror film Sinners. He spoke with Terry Gross in 1993. We're playing an excerpt today.
Listen: https://tinyurl.com/48spch72

02/06/2025

07/05/2025

Buddy Guy would do just about anything for the blues. So when he got the call for a role in Ryan Coogler’s musical horror period-drama “Sinners,” the answer was an easy yes.

Then the nerves kicked in.

“Man, I had goose pimples everywhere. I couldn’t hardly sleep that night after shooting and the night before,” Guy, who turns 89 in July, said in a phone interview from his home in Chicago. In his main scene opposite Michael B. Jordan and Hailee Steinfeld, in a bar after the film jumps from the 1930s to the ’90s, he said he almost needed a stiff drink.

“I never did drink alcohol until I met Muddy Waters and them, and they said, ‘If you drink a little schoolboy Scotch, Buddy, your nerves would be a little better off.’ And that wasn’t schoolboy Scotch during filming, that was just water, but I hoped they would bring me a shot because I didn’t want them to see me shaking,” he said with a laugh.

In the film, which has become a box office and critical smash, and a cultural phenomenon, Guy portrays the older version of Sammie Moore, a blues musician played by Miles Caton in his earlier years.

(The plot revolves around the Smokestack twins, both played by Jordan, and their efforts to ward off vampires, who offer Sammie eternal life.) Guy said he hadn’t watched the entire film yet — “I’m afraid to see it because I don’t want to say if I’m bad or good” — but he’s hoping “Sinners” bridges the gap between younger audiences and the blues, and shines a light on the genre’s legacy.

“I saw a little clip of the movie and said, ‘Wow, this may help the blues stay alive.’ Some kid who never heard of the blues might wake up and say, ‘I better check that out,’” Guy said. “Blues has been treated like a stepchild ever since the big FM stations came out,” he added. He said he made a promise to Waters and B.B. King ““that I would try to keep the blues alive because the blues is the history of all music.”

the composer and an executive producer of Sinners Ludwig Goransson said the influential bluesman Son House was one of Coogler’s models for “Sinners,” and before meeting Guy, Goransson watched a YouTube clip of the two playing guitar and discussing the evolution of music. “That’s part of what the movie is,” the composer said, adding that he sees its final minutes, when Guy picks up the guitar, as the most powerful part of the film. “It’s just how he plays it. You can hear all the music in that one-and-a-half minute of him playing.”

The blues sound is at the center of “Sinners” and its main inspiration is the blues legend Robert Johnson’s mythical encounter with the devil, in which he exchanged his soul for musical prowess. “That story has been out for a while,” Guy said, “but I’m from Louisiana and I don’t believe in all of it.” He waved off the idea of voodoo: “In my mind, I say, ‘Oh Buddy, you don’t believe in that whole stuff.’ Because a fortuneteller can tell you how to make money, but he can’t tell himself how to make money — so I never did fall for that.” I would try to keep the blues alive because the blues is the history of all music.”

He compared the success of “Sinners” to meeting his blues idols for the first time: “When I first saw B.B. King, I was afraid to say anything, him and Muddy Waters and all those great people, Son House, Fred McDowell. And you can’t dream of that where I come from. This is a dream come true.”

Guy will hit the road next month — “when you get my age you can’t jump off the stage like I did when I was 23, but I’m going to still give 100 percent” — and remains dedicated to getting himself, and his fellow blues greats, their proper due.

By Mesfin Fekadu / NY Times
Photo: Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune/TNS)

16/03/2024

Bonnie Raitt - Used to Rule the World - Live at Austin City Limits.