Blues Musicians Get Help Overcoming Hard Times (NY Times)

[OneBlueSky]

By ANDREW JACOBS
The New York Times
Sunday, March 21, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/21/national/21BLUE.html
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(snip)

From the Appalachian highlands to the Mississippi Delta, musicians who got by on drink house tips and street corner busking have found themselves living in decaying mobile homes, formerly nimble fingers twisted with age, their homespun repertoires lost with their deaths.

"These people are our culture, our folk musicians, and no one is looking after them," said the bluesman Taj Mahal. "We're always putting our hands over our heart and saying the Pledge of Allegiance and honoring Davy Crockett, yet we're allowing these people and their music to fall through the cracks."

In the 1980's, while recording old-time mountain musicians in North Carolina, Tim Duffy came to a similar realization. As a student studying folklore at the University of North Carolina, he grew obsessed with preserving the sounds of these unheralded musicians. But as he traveled the rural South with recording equipment, he grew even more troubled by the poverty that left many artists without instruments and too strapped for heating oil or medicine.

"Their music ended up in archives but the problem is no one gets to hear it," said Mr. Duffy, who lives in Hillsborough, N.C. "And the recordings don't put food on their table, it doesn't get them a gig."

- more . . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/21/national/21BLUE.html
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