Steve Cushing, the award-winning host of the nationally syndicated
public radio staple Blues before Sunrise, has spent over thirty years
observing and participating in the Chicago blues scene. In Pioneers of
the Blues Revival, he interviews many of the prominent white
researchers and enthusiasts whose advocacy spearheaded the blues'
crossover into the mainstream starting in the 1960s.
Opinionated and territorial, the American, British, and French
interviewees provide fascinating first-hand accounts of the era and
movement. Experts including Paul Oliver, Gayle Dean Wardlow, Sam
Charters, Ray Flerledge, Paul Oliver, Richard K. Spottswood, and Pete
Whelan chronicle in their own words their obsessive early efforts at
cataloging blues recordings and retrace lifetimes spent loving, finding,
collecting, reissuing, and producing records. They and nearly a dozen
others recount relationships with blues musicians, including the
discoveries of prewar bluesmen Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Skip
James, and Bukka White, and the reintroduction of these musicians and
many others to new generations of listeners. The accounts describe
fieldwork in the South, renew lively debates, and tell of rehearsals in
Muddy Waters's basement and randomly finding Lightning Hopkins's guitar
in a pawn shop.
Blues scholar Barry Lee Pearson provides a critical and historical
framework for the interviews in an introduction.
