Blues Roadhouse

Please allow me to introduce myself.

I’m a blues music fan. I’ve been hooked on the music since it played its way into my teenage DNA many (many) years ago, sometimes disguised as doo-wop, or jump blues, or rhythm and blues, or just plain old down-home blues.

I wasn’t quite ready for the rawness and roughness of the blues. I was still trying to figure out why the doggie was in the window and the pawnshop was on the corner. (C’mon, I know some of you will remembers those.) But the blues seemed ready for me. It fit right into the hip pocket of my teen blue genes. I traded The Singing Rage Miss Patti Page for Big Mama Thornton and never thought twice.

I first started writing about this, and other music, for the Worcester, Mass., Telegram & Gazette newspaper in the 1960s.

Confused by my very real youth and my ersatz hipness, unsuspecting editors let me cover the music of such diverse artists as the Jefferson Airplane, Ray Charles, Josh White Jr., and Carolyn Hester, and also sent me to write about several Newport Folk Festivals in the late 1960s.

Since then, I wrote about the music for the Pittsburgh Press and then the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspapers.

But my best blues gig began about 2007, when still more unsuspecting editors let me start a blues blog on the Post-Gazette web site, where I worked as a content editor in my day job. Some of you might even remember — it was called BlueNotes, and even though I thought it would live forever, it has disappeared into impenetrable depths of the internet.

I’ve since moved on again, and the Blues Roadhouse is my latest project, another blog where I can scratch the itch I have to talk about the blues, and lots of music that’s related to it.

In the Roadhouse, I’ll be talking about new blues, old blues, maybe some blues news, music that’s not quite blues but closely related, and just generally rambling along the long and winding blues highway.

I hope you’ll stop by once in a while, leave a comment if you feel like it, and share with your friends. That’s the key to this blues highway.