Chicago blues guitar player and singer Steady Rollin’ Bob Margolin was born in 1949 in Massachusetts and started playing guitar with local bands when he was 15 years old.
His true professional musical career took off as guitarist for the Boston psychedelic band Freeborn and he appeared on their 1967 album, “Peak Impressions”.
http://youtu.be/Ozn6N5ssPTM
It was Chuck Berry who first inspired Bob Margolin to play the guitar. Berry also pushed Bob towards the blues. That turned out to be a very good thing since Margolin’s drive to learn the ‘old school’ style of Muddy Waters resulted in his discovery of Margolin. From 1973 to 1980 Margolin played with The Muddy Waters Blues Band and appeared with Muddy on The Band’s “Last Waltz” concert.
Since the early 1980's Margolin has remained a stalwart of the Chicago crowd, both as bandleader and as sideman with all of the top blues artists. His influence on the blues world extends beyond his guitar playing through his writing of a column for “Blues Review” magazine.
http://youtu.be/OTZMPItSY0o
We’ll hear a full set from Bob Margolin this week on The Nine O’clock Blues.
Nashville born singer-songwriter-guitarist Ellen McIlwaine should be a lot better known than she is. She is a multi-talented woman with multi-cultural influences due to the fact that she was adopted by missionaries and raised in Kobe, Japan. Her blues influences began with playing the piano pieces of Ray Charles, Fats Domino and Professor Longhair that she heard on Japanese radio. Then when she moved back to the United States she bought a guitar and worked hard to become a slide guitar player. We’ll find out how well she managed this week on The Nine O’clock Blues.
And now from our “For heaven sakes, DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME department”:
On this week’s show I’ll play a live version of Doug MacLeod’s song “Doola” about a mysterious Southern drink that sounds a lot like Canned Heat to me. After a bit of research I’ve discovered that both Doola and Canned Heat can mean different things in different parts of the country, but nearly all versions use some industrial product, such as “Sterno” that is processed into an undoubtedly very dangerous ‘supposed to be drinkable’ intoxicant. Unless you are suicidal or have an insatiable desire to demonstrate Darwin’s theory, don’t do it.
