With my arm folded up and crying...

While we were on vacation, we also did a bit of shopping. There's a gi-normous music outlet store in Foley, AL where Stacie bought me two box sets of Blues CD's.

(How cool is it that I get presents for her birthday?)

She bought me a double CD set of Robert Johnson (not the Complete Recordings, but it has almost all his songs) and a double CD set called The Blues came from Mississippi/Memphis (one CD is Memphis the other is Miss.).

Those gifts combined with the insane number of free blues MP3's I've recently found is starting to make up for my lack of a turntable...

The MP3's are legal by the way - many of the early blues sides recorded on OkeH, Vocalion and other, now defunct, labels are in the public domain.

Sweet!

These events along with my recent read of Francis Davis' book and the discovery of some cool Blues sites and blogs have contributed to my renewed interest in the Blues.

Not that I was ever not interested in the blues - not since the mid-eighties anyway - I just went through a period where I didn't listen to the Blues very much.

Part of this was due to the fact that my turntable broke and most of my blues recordings were on vinyl. I had neither the money, space, time nor inclination to go out and get a new turntable just to listen to a bunch of ancient blues recordings.

It's different now, though. Between the Mp3's, the websites and my meager Blues CD collection, I'm back in business.

And my son is getting interested as well. He's been singing along with Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Robert Johnson and others.

Unfortunately, he's also been joining in with his sister and his mother when they ridicule my Blind Willie Johnson tunes.

(I will admit that Blind Willie (right) is an acquired taste)

But they all like most anything by Mississippi John Hurt. That guy just had an almost universally appealing sound - probably why he became a favorite of the '60's folkies.

And even my lovely wife, Bee-Gee's fanatic that she is, asked if she could hear the 'Arm fold' up an' cryin' song. That, of course, is not the name of the song but I knew that she meant 'Ramblin' on My Mind' by Robert Johnson.

It will require super-human diligence and Herculean strength of will, but one day, eventually, I will have turned them into Blues fans.