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is a kind of showcase of what an incredible guitar, an innovative guitar player, Lonnie Johnson was. So I got the
guitarist on the album, a great guitarist named Danny Caron, whom I love to record and perform with. He's known
best for being Charles Brown's guitarist for many years and he plays right on the cusp between blues and jazz. Kind
of like Lonnie Johnson did. As a labour of love Danny Caron learned Lonnie Johnson's solos, note for note. And believe
me, it was no easy task for him because they're very hot solos. He nailed them perfectly. We just wanted to add that
authentic vibe and sound to those tracks. And I think he did an amazing job.

FD: If you could grab a time machine and go back, where and when would you go back or go to the future and why
there and then?

MM: Well, I think I would go back to the 1920s because that seems
to be where so much of the music I really love started to emerge and
be created. And I'd definitely go see all my blues heroines live and
in person.

I'd go listen to Memphis Minnie. I'd go listen to Bessie Smith and
Sippie Wallace. She, Sippie, was another blues woman that I got to
record with and got to know because the Kweskin Jug Band
rediscovered her in the 60s and brought her out of retirement and
presented her concert in New York and at Newport Folk Festival. We
ended up doing a recording with her.

And then, you know, I’d go and see all the jazz greats, God, Louis
Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson. I mean, you just
name it. And not to mention people like Jimmy Rodgers, you know,
people in the country music. field. So that was a wonderful time
musically, and I think I would have been just in heaven to be able to
go and hear all my favourite artists in person.

FD: What still makes you happy and excited about the music
industry some 60 years later?

MM: I don't think I like anything about the music industry. You know,
it's all about the music itself for me. I mean, in a way, it's gotten a
lot easier to get your music out there, you know, on all these
different platforms and so forth. I'll tell you the thing I do like about
these modern times is that it's so much easier to access all kinds of
music. I mean, back when, in 1963, when Victoria Spivey played me
a Memphis Minnie song in her apartment. I was really struck by it,
and I fell in love with how she sounded, but it took me a dozen years
before I could find one other recording of Memphis Minnie. When somebody put it out on an LP and put out a
compilation of some of her recordings.

Nowadays, if you were to tell someone who had never heard of Victoria's Five [Victoria Spivey’s band] or Memphis
Minnie, they could go home and with one click of the mouse, download and listen to, you know, hundreds of their
recordings. So that's something that is a plus for these days.
You know, I just don't pay that much attention to the industry. I just make my little recordings and they somehow
get out there. I've had four Grammy nominations in the last 20 years with four different albums that I produced. All
of vintage blues material, you know, so nothing that I was aiming for big commercial success, but yet got recognized.
The music got out there because this music is organically created and therefore even though a lot of it originated
over 100 years ago it still really resonates with people. Here we are in 2025, and people still are digging this music.
So that's why I do it.

FD: And we appreciate you still doing it, which is fantastic.

MM: Well, one of the things, about Victoria Spivey that struck me as I started delving deeper and deeper into her
history and her whole body of work was that she was very versatile she wasn't just a blues singer she wanted to be