hill country blues

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When they serendiptiously crossed paths onstage with Phil Lesh & Friends, JD Simo and Luther Dickinson's musical souls spoke to each other. They started jamming together leading them to cut Do The Romp at JD's home studio, combining their appreciation of hill country blues, spirituals, swamp rock, and Afrobeat in a modern grease and grime.

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Cedric Burnside, the reigning lion of Mississippi hill country blues.

How a musical legacy is passed from generation to generation.

I’m fascinated by family traditions. Much of my family’s were lost in the transition from Poland to the U.S., and to a language barrier. Thus, the details of my grandmother's history as a village healer in her youth are lost. But for musical families, legacies are easier to trace and preserve, thanks to recordings and other documentation.

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Our senior editor onstage with R.L. Burnside for the first time, at the original House of Blues in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Photo by Margo Cooper

How meeting one of my guitar heroes changed my life.

This month’s Question & Obsession (“Have You Ever Met One of Your Guitar Heroes?”) gave me a Crank-like jolt of gratitude. Such encounters are one of the gifts of this music journalism gig, and it conjured a riptide of joyful memories. A few: traveling with Metallica in the Netherlands and Italy; gift shopping with Billy Gibbons; smoking weed with blues legend Robert Lockwood and counterculture legend John Sinclair along the banks of the Mississippi; interviewing Robert Fripp at his ancestral home in Cranborne, Dorset, and meeting his delightful mother, Edith; being introduced to Leo Fender by Les Paul; nearly getting tossed out of a hotel bar in Akron with Scorpions (we were hammered, disorderly, and on the first Monsters of Rock tour); many conversations with B.B. King; trading jokes with the wonderful Sonny Sharrock; instigating a jam with Danny Gatton and Billy Sheehan (after Billy and I were nearly ejected from Trader Vic’s in Chicago … alcohol again!); and trading bootleg tapes with Carlos Santana.

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