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BiTS: I'm pretty sure I'm right in saying that you only made a couple of albums with Roomful
of Blues.

DR: Yes, I made two albums with Roomful. That's correct, and then I left after two albums
because at that time we had no record deal, and we had some just different opinions of business
in the band. I got an offer to go with Robert Gordon, so I went, and I played in his band for a while,
and I played with the Legendary Blues Band which was Muddy Waters ex backup band. I played
with them for a while and then I started my own trio to keep it economically feasible to work a
lot with just three pieces, and then I built it back up from there.

BiTS: Over the years, you have made literally dozens of albums. Sometimes as a side man, very
often as the leader of a band. Do you have any kind of favourite amongst the stuff that you’ve

done? Is there one that you are really, really proud of?
DR: Well, there's a lot of them because I think my new album coming out is probably my 39th
album under my own name. So the ones that I made with Herb Ellis, “Conversations In Swing”,

I'm very, very pleased with. A lot of my kind of blues, R&B and swing type records are the ones
that I identify most with, even though I've done all kinds of different blues, R&B and even rock
and roll. The ones like “After Hours Swing
Session” or the album entitled “Swing” with
Scott Hamilton, “A Swinging Session”, that's
another one that's a little more recent.
That's kind of jazz oriented. Those are the
ones that I'm happiest with. There are some
of the blues albums like “Duke’s Blues” that
I'm very pleased with and the one that we
have coming out is, I think, a really special
record.

BiTS: For what reason?

DR: Well, there's a bunch of reasons. One is
because I started it 20 years ago, or more
and what happened was we got nine tracks
down and then I had this idea for another

record, and I wanted to pursue it. The label
let me go ahead and put this one just aside
to finish later and it just happened to have
never gotten finished. Then we sort of forgot about it, but we knew that we had to complete it.
Then when I listened to it after years, I realised that it was a really great R&B album and so I
finished it and it's just going to come out now.

BiTS: Yes, that's absolutely fabulous. Did you have to re-record things or do sort of overdubbing,
or whatever?

DR: I added a couple extra tunes that we also had done for other records that were blues tunes
that fit exactly with the programme. So I just added like, I think, three more tunes to it and it all
fit together perfectly. I mean you can't tell one from the other sessions sound-wise because the
tunes are all either my own songs or they're the influences that were the strongest on me, guys
like T-Bone Walker and Lowell Fulson and Gatemouth Brown. So there's a theme to the whole
thing, even though the last three tunes were finished later.