After playing rock music in bands since 1972, in 1990 I left the city & my youthful ambition to be a rock star behind, choosing a simple life in the hills south of Bridgetown. Some years later a friend casually introduced me to the old Country Blues & I thought why haven’t I ever heard this stuff before? Whatever those African Americans were doing was what I’d been searching for my whole life.
Keith Richards said we’re all Africans it’s just that some of us wandered north and turned white. So I set off on my journey back south to find the African inside.
I dove in head first & flailed around in this huge deep lake of regional guitar styles & players that is 1920’s & 30’s Country Blues until finally, overwhelmed, I drowned my white self in its hypnotic grooves & floated down through Piedmont, Texas, Mississippi Delta and Hill Country Blues way down past names & titles to the bedrock, those deep blues in all their difficult & beautiful African glory.
Eventually I emerged reborn as a latter day Hill Country Bluesman with a deep love and respect for the artists who gave me this great gift through the study of their old recordings – those stunning performances preserved on scratchy old 78rpm discs, often pressed using poor quality shellac. As a result some folks can’t get past the scratchety hiss, crackle & pops….all I can hear are the beautiful players….Charley Patton, Son House, Willie Brown, Bukka White, John Hurt, Mance Lipscombe, Tampa Red, Blind Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, Fred McDowell and so many more.
I am honoured to be carrying on such a venerable tradition and doing my best to live up to its ridiculously high standards. It has become my love, my life & my passion and I have devoted myself to its irresistible hypnotic grooves. Just for the love of it. And that single minded passion has made a new man of me, a Bridgetown Hill Country Bluesman, rambling the Deep South of Western Australia playing my stuff.
My Bridgetown Hill Country Blues.
