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Then I started writing songs in this style, and then later we went into real salsa and Puerto Rican
music and mumbo and the Cuban. I met some fantastic musicians from Cuba and a guy from New
York called Emmanuel Rahim, who came to Denmark
in 76, and he was a percussion wizard. He was a
fantastic conga player and timbales player, and he
was very spiritual. And for me, the impact on me has
always been the spiritual music. When I was a kid, I

didn't know why, it's just like when I heard blues the
first time, it was like here's something that goes
deeper than The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, or
whatever we were listening to at the time. This was
some kind of spiritual music, but I didn't know the
word at the time. I can see that’s what it was that I
was recognising.

BiTS: Yes, I understand.

KL: I've always been like when I was little, I
remember I talked to God [chuckles]. My parents
weren’t very religious or anything like that, but I just
had this in me that there was a spiritual side of life. I didn't know what it was, but it was just
something that was there. I was thinking a lot about life and death since I was a kid, actually.

BiTS: It's the kind of music that you don't just listen to with your ears. You listen to with your
heart and your mind as well.

KL: Exactly, exactly, and that's what I wanted to do. I wasn't really looking for if I could learn to
play this, I would be a musician, a professional musician. I never thought I could be that because
I've always had this from my family, oh you have to take education and all this. So it was like I

never had this thought that someone could make a living from it or anything like that, it was just
something I had to do every day.
It was just like kind of prayer
[chuckles].

BiTS: Of course, yeah. Absolutely.
Let's move on a bit, Kenn. Tell me
how did you meet Jack Dupree?

KL: I met him in 1978 because
one of my friends, he was playing
New Orleans music. He had a New
Orleans jazz band. He was a
drummer, and he also was
arranging concerts at a school in
one of the Copenhagen suburbs.
One day we were talking on the
phone, and he said do you know
who's in my kitchen cooking? I said, [chuckling] how should I know that? He said it’s Champion
Jack Dupree. Wow!

I remembered Jack from the American Folk Blues Festival in 1970, and he was one of the acts at
that concert that all of us remembered because he was so funny. He was like making fun of Willie