My tastes in music, as I have spelled out here before, are very diverse. They range from my roots, which are Motown, 60’s Rock & Roll (The Doors, Cream, Hendrix, The Beatles, The Animals, Traffic, etc) Metal (Zeppelin, Van Halen, Ritchie Blackmore, Krokus, Scorpions, etc) Jazz, (Jean Luc Ponte, Earl Klugh, the late Grover Washington Jr., the Laws family, Wynton Marsalis, Thelonius Monk, etc.), Big band and Swing (too many to list), REAL old school funk (Parliament, The Brothers Johnson, Bootsy Collins, Brides of Funkenstein, Barkays, Brass Construction, Fatback, etc.), Country Rock (Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker Band, Pure Prairie League, Creedance etc), and an awful lot of the modern music that this music inspired. I love the Cranberries, Dashboard Confessional, Verve Pipe, Cult, Cure, Cars, and all kinds of stuff. I even like some Bluegrass, the soundtrack to O’ Brother Where Art Thou? is simply a masterpiece.
But my first love is the Blues. Blues was born of black inspired slave day gospel and speaks to the soul like no other music ever has. From the blues every genre’ of music I just mention and then some was born of the blues, and in its purest form it is the best music I have ever heard, I have been in little blues bars all over the country and it is always the same, full of soul like nothing else. My absolute favorite is the late great Stevie Ray Vaughan, no one else comes close IMO. Even artists like Buddy Guy, Albert King, Lonnie Mack, BB King, acknowledge that he was the best. He died waaaay too young. I also dig John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, Koko Taylor, Willie Dixon, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Hound Dog Taylor, Lead Belly, and cats like that, John Mayal is pretty awesome too.
