"Each time, each one makes history, makes their mark in history. We each do it and the blues will never die, because it has to do with people, places and things, and as long as those are here it'll never die." - B.B. King

INDEX Laura Chavez interview January 2004 B.B. King interview August 2003 Blues 10101 The birth of the blues in the South San Francisco Bay Area. Gary Smith Interview with one of the greatest mouth-harp players in the world. Review of "Cain Does King" CD October 2000 Interview with Chris Cain James Cotton Interview Triviana visits San Francisco Blues Festival 2000. Lots of photographs, and interviews with Elvin Bishop, Dave Garibaldi of Tower of Power and Johnny Otis. José Luis Villegas/John Orr Blues project Susan Tedeschi Interview John Lee Hooker in Concert Chris Cain in "Thunder Knocking at the Door" How the Blues once saved Doc Gone BLUES LINKS San Francisco Blues Festival site Bluesnet The Blue Highway

Anyone who's ever been touched - deeply - by music has the key to understanding the blues, even if a stranger to Howlin' Wolf or Muddy Waters or Jimmy Reed or T-Bone Walker or Albert King or B.B. King.

It is not a music of skin color or even of an era. As John Lee Hooker has said, "The blues was born of Adam and Eve."

The blues is a music of timeless humanity, given a greater voice born of the suffering of American blacks in the cotton and tobacco fields and along the levees of the old South, and brought north to factories and the tenements with the great black exodus of the early and mid-20th century.

The blues has evolved and mutated and spun off forms like sparks off a fireworks pinwheel. Each generation of blues musicians has taken from it and each has given back something new.

"The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits," explained the great Willie Dixon. "It's better keeping the roots alive, because it means better fruits from now on."

What we want to do here is celebrate the blues, and the people who have and do make this music for us.

Thanks, blues people.