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MH: Yes, I've got the blowouts coming up most of February, like you know, 12 days in February.

I've got a tour lined up in the South that I'm working on that's going to go from Southern
California all the way out to Louisiana and Mississippi. I'm going to Italy on a vacation in May,
but I'm doing this James Cotton tribute now too, and I'm going to do some of those at the
beginning of May and then I'm doing some of those the end of July. Then I'm playing dates with
Junior Watson and Bill Stuve and Wes Starr, and those are going to be a festival back east called
the North Atlantic Blues Festival and then a festival in the Midwest called the Big Bulls Blues
Festival. I'm working on dates around those. We're also doing the Legendary Rhythm and Blues
Cruise in October with those
guys.
Magic Dick aka Richard

Salwitz BiTS: Doesn't seem to be any
sign of you slowing down yet.

MH: Not really, no. I'm pretty
busy and it's a big job. You
know, the deal with me is I still
book myself most of the time.
It's a real ordeal booking
yourself, but frankly, I've been
doing it off and on for 38

years, and I kind of know the
bulk of the buyers out there,
which helps and have good
relationships with most of
them. So, you know, I'm able
to really book tours that are pretty successful in terms of keeping us busy.

BiTS: Now I've got one more question to ask you and then a favour to ask you as well. The
question is quite simply this: of all the people that you list in your book, there are dozens of
them, is there one that is meeting somebody that is still outstanding to you, which kind of makes
your hair stand on end when you think about it.

MH: Well, I guess what I go back to in general, and I kind of mentioned this in the book, is that
the very first guys that I got to see, Brownie and Sonny, Charlie Musselwhite and James Cotton,
that all three of those acts, to be able to go see those guys as a teenager and then actually get to
know and be friends with those guys later on in life, is pretty astounding to me. That kind of
goes also for guys like Lee Oskar and Magic Dick. I mean, Magic Dick is a really, really good friend
of mine. All of these guys are guys that I got a chance to really work with quite a bit and I continue
to work with, so, you know, the fact that I'm friends with all these guys. Oh, the other thing I
ought to mention is my podcast. Did I mention that? Did I mention my podcast?

BiTS: No, you didn't.

MH: Okay, well this is something that I've been doing over the last two years, and it's really
been thrilling, which is I do a podcast now. It's called Mark Hummel Harmonica Party, and it's
available on YouTube and 12 other platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon. It's like all over
the place. It's on 12 different platforms and what it is, is it's me interviewing all these people
that I know and that I've worked with over the years. So I've got, like, literally 60 interviews

with all these famous musicians and it's like because they're people that I've all worked with,
you know, like Charlie Musselwhite and Nick Gravenites and Magic Dick and Lee Oskar. I've got,
you know, Barbara Dane in there, if you know who she is, who's an old, old friend. She's like,