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BiTS INTERVIEW: Elly Wininger

Inducted into the NY Blues Hall of Fame in 2014, Elly Wininger's third album "Little Red Wagon"
was #8 on the Folk Music DJ Chart for January 2018 and in the top 100 for that year. Her current
album, "The Blues Never End" including the award-winning song "Right Kind of Trouble" was

released in September 2021 by Earwig Music. Check out the review of that album HERE. Running
special programmes for song writers, children and senior citizens and the disabled, she also
assists performers in stagecraft. She is based in Woodstock, NY (yes! That one!)

BiTS: Okay, Elly, let’s make a start at the very beginning. Tell me what it is that attracts you to
blues music?

EW: That’s sort of a mysterious question with a mysterious answer. I
don’t know. That’s a really good
question. I don’t know because I
heard it when I was so young, I

wasn’t really conscious of why or
what was going on. It just sort of was a
mesmerising thing. My parents had a
great record collection. They were big music
fans, and they had the Smithsonian collections,
Smithsonian Folkways, I think it was back then, and
I used to listen to those records and just feel a

connection to the music on them.

BiTS: Who was the music by? What were you listening
to?

EW: Well, I was listening to Vera Hall. I was listening
to Blind Willie Johnson. I was listening to Lead Belly. I

wasn’t aware of their names, but as I got older I realised
who they were, and I was listening also to Cisco Houston and
Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and that was the music I grew
up with and loved and then I went to this great summer camp
for many years where we sang all the time. We just sang all the
time, and we sang songs that we knew and liked. And I brought
songs from Leon Bibb and Bob Dylan and Fred Neil and all the

folk revival artists. So I stayed in the folk realm, but I had this
backlog of memories of the blues people.

BiTS: At what age did you start playing the guitar?

EW: Six.

BiTS: Really?

EW: Yes, my mum bought me a little, tiny little Harmony guitar at a yard sale up here in
Woodstock and she was smart enough to get me a few lessons and I remember playing three string
cords when I was very young. Then she tried to steer towards more serious instruments like the
piano and the violin, which I hated - the violin, but the piano was a good thing to have a grip on,