Welcome one and all, glad you decided to stop by and have a listen. hope you like what you hear... hopefully i should be putting some other tunes up here this next week or so for your listening enjoyment. 
 

Hiya folks, i am a Bluesman of the old school,  i've lived the life, had it tough, and overcome the emotional repercussions that my life has left me with by beating out my dis-satisfaction on each guitar i've ever owned.  so fiercely that I have destroyed everyone of them, regardless of quality.
     This was the method used by the Bluesmen of old, and was how they managed to come to terms with the poor treatment they felt was their lot in life.   Most of them decided that they had enough of working for nothing or very little reward, usually just blisters and a bad back.  So they hit the road to make what they could from what they had become good at,  playing guitar... 
     Some of them were unable to work because of blindness caused from drinking bad water,  the result of the very poor living conditions they had endured.  Some of these we know of and regard nowadays as the greatest Blues players to have ever lived. 
      I believe this is because they were consumed by the blues, pain and suffering was all they knew.  I can tell you this much for nothing,  when you've had a shit life, it does tend to focus you somewhat.   This anger when it gets out of hand can lead to unhealthy displays of behaviour, for instance violence and aggression.. The sort of behaviour we see all too regularly nowadays on the streets of England... No-where's exempt any longer from this modern malaise...  Merely borne out of the extreme frustration and inner rage that builds up when you feel powerless and unable to effect a change in your circumstances... Add to that a whole heap of emotional immaturity and hey presto...  The next generation of social misfits are produced...  In truth all that this really does is increase the sadness within, that is truly behind the anger...
     The secret that these Bluesmen and women discovered, was that their ill feelings diminished when they applied themselves fully and focused all their anger and rage completely as they played...   Turning an all consuming negative feeling into beauty,  thereby breaking the cycle of anger/outburst, anger/outburst...  Enabling them to offload some of their tremendous burdens without adding and attracting more grief and ill feeling, towards themselves or others...  In effect taking huge strides towards their own self improvement...   This is what i have found this music to do for me... 

  I came to it, or should i say it found me, at a very difficult and challenging time in my life... I damaged the nerves in my back while at work, forcing me to give up the job i loved so dearly, building high quality acoustic guitars for a company called Fylde Guiars...  I lived for my work, a labour of love you could say...   But unfortunately it wasn't to be, and i had to come to terms with crippling back pain and the loss of my livelyhood and dream...   A triple whammy of ginormous proportions...                    Followed by the indignity of being told by the doctors and specialists that they could find nothing physically wrong with me... This sent me into a spiral of despair that i only found release from by hammering out my frustrations upon my trusty Fylde...   I was already a proficient guitarist playing various folk styles, simon and garfunkel type material amongst others...  Plus i was steeped in the blues, mainly electric though, as i used to frequent the weekly gatherings at the local blues venue, the Kite Club in blackpool... but this was before i played so it was just inspirational as opposed to learning from other artists... but it must have rubbed off in some way...    As i was accused of playing the blues many times earlier in my carreer as a musician, yet i always described it as folk with a groove... ha ha... And so it truly is... Like Satchmo once said "all music is folk music, i aint never seen no horse sing no song"...     I hadn't ever heard of country blues before nevermind listened to it...   So it kinda developed from the repetetive fingerpicking excercises i used to regiment my right hand with... While learning folk tunes...  And the result of being told that "it was the left hand that was the quality of what you played, and the right hand was the rythym"...  oh and bizzarely enough, playing along to house music after the raves of late 89 early 90,  these two factors alone, now i look back on it,  hastened and regimented fully my ability to play in time with repetative beats...  I actually began playing funnily enough, and i remember it well, after watching a video of Barclay James Harvest playing a gig at the Berlin wall...  And i made the comment (inbetween whinging how much E minor was hurting the ends of my fingers), that      "I wonder if we'll ever see it come down in our lifetimes" to my friend Roy Millard...(Who had the unenviable task of getting me started with chords and simple fingrpicking) ha ha...  We both looked at each other and said in unison "No way"... A week later I was learning A minor  watching the locals ripping it apart...   Funny old place this world, as you just never quite know what'll happen next... I kept this thought -  "left hand quality, right hand rythym", uppermost in my mind and just went on from there, developing naturally.   Until i could play most anything by way of watching and copying, or so i thought!!   I then, during my incapacity, came upon a book of old Blues standards and found that there was far more to the syncopations of the right hand than i'd previously thought possible...  the separation of the thumb and fingers to create a three handed rythym approach similar to that found in piano playing...  The rest has become history now...  apart from the pain...                             Anyway back to the story...
There are many styles of the Blues, these were usually linked to particular geographical areas where the "sound" seemed to be somewhat generalized among the local population...  Most often we hear about the most Primal of all these styles, Delta Blues...  Which originated in the floodplains of the Mississippi where life was harshest...     The bulk of the recorded blues from this area, are widely regarded as the starkest most haunting examples of this type of Musical Expression...           I tend to agree in general... I consider it the most Primal of all Blues Styles... and out of the two distinct forms of Delta Blues, the one  I personally prefer is "Bottleneck" or Slide Guitar...  Because of it's ability to approximate the Expressive Qualities of the human voice...  Regarded purely as a vocal tradition nowadays, I believe that the Delta Blues show many examples of where the individual was so emotionally damaged that they struggled to sing... Managing in some instances to only growl a few lines or in some cases a high pitched wail or two...  Sometimes just the bare, raw emotion they managed to release upon the guitar or banjo...
      But there is another thread to this story...  One not discussed very often nowadays, almost buried by the sands of time... and the pages of History, (or as i prefer to call it  "the lie most commonly believed")....
      The manufactured economic migration in the that these tough times led to, helped not only export the techniques that were recognized as "Delta" into the cities and centres of economic opportunity,  but led also to the importing of other influences and Styles back into the Mississippi Delta...  Including the syncopations of the dance craze known as "Ragtime" or Early Jazz that was sweeping the American nation at the turn of the century...  The recorded Jazz records that were being played on wind up '78 record players even in the more rural areas, that were without electricity... And being emulated by the players of the day,  thus leading to an explosion of even more dance oriented arrangements.... Making the expression of the Blues and Early Jazz converge... In doing so, becoming so much more beneficial to the Bluesmen of the day, who beat out their troubles on their instruments....    and that in essence is what or who this music is about...  Their expression of inner turmoil and the overcoming of it....   And don't let anyone tell you any different...
                                                                                                                            to be continued......          

                                                                                                                                                                                             Felonious Monk