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fifties and sixties, early sixties before I was a teenager, we rode bikes all over the place and the
neighbourhoods were mixed around me and so I got a taste of that culture that just was a lot more
fun than the one I was in. I lived near a black high school that had a marching band going and they
had way more fun than I was having and there was a black church down the street that had this
wonderful music coming and I don’t know, I just absorbed it.

BiTS: Is that how the blues found you or did you find the blues? Which way round was it?

LRW: Well, I don’t know I think we just bumped heads [laughing]. I’m not sure how we got there
but when I was first really tuned into it I was in my young teens and there was a music store in
town and it had this book in there on country blues and I was just captivated by the picture on the
front which was Son House with that steel National Guitar and I bought the book and I stood

looking through the songbook and it was all like Mississippi John Hurt’s songs. Real traditional
blues and that captivated me. I was interested in it. Still had no idea it was in my state, that that
music came from here. I wasn’t concentrating on that I was just a kid and just enjoying it. I had a
guitar. First, I had a ukulele, then I
had a guitar and I just really learned

from friends. We’d sit around and
learn different chords and play the
usual folk song things back then. It
wasn’t really until I hit high school
and there was a family that moved
here from California and they bought
a whole new set of records for me to

hear and that changed everything.
Then I was listening to Freddie King
and people like that.

BiTS: And I gather, later on, I’m not

sure when it was, that you organised
or helped to organise a festival that
Libby Rae with Sam Chatmon resulted in you meeting Sam

Chatmon.

LRW: The Delta Blues Festival. The very first one back in 1978, yes and it kind of turned out to be a

nightmare because the people putting it on were not well organised. But anyway, it was what it
was, and we had a great time anyway.

BiTS: Tell me how you met Sam.

LRW: I met Sam by driving to Hollandale and knocking on his door. He came to the door. We
chatted a minute and he invited me and my friend that was with me, inside and we were in there. I
don’t even remember that day if he even played guitar for us. We talked and got to know him and
what Sam and I discovered is that we both had January birthdays that were five days apart and
many years apart [chuckling] but we bonded from that. He thought that was pretty cool and so did
I, so we carried that joke with us until he died about the birthday things. We just hit it off. He was a