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original intent. Hilly Kristal had a club on 13th Street in Manhattan, called Hilly’s, and I used to play
there regularly because he was a big blues fan and he said to me one day, I’m opening up a new club
in the east village. Do you want to play? So I played opening night at CBGB, which I’m surprised you
haven’t heard of. It really became such a hot spot for the punk scene, so people who don’t know

what CBGB actually stands for are a little surprised when they read that item in my bio.

BiTS: We’re here really to talk
about your new record, but
before we do, let’s talk about the
old one. The album that you did
called “Little Red Wagon” was

very popular, was it not, a
couple of years ago in 2018
when it came out?

EW: That’s right. It did very
well in the folk realm because it
had some singer-songwriter

stuff and some blues. It was
kind of a mixed bag, but it didn’t
get really noticed on the blues
scene because it had so many
different sorts of things on it.

Whereas this album, this new
one is directly pretty much both
feet in the blues world.

BiTS: The new one is called
“The Blues Never End”. Did you
make it all in one go? Have you

got your own studio, or did you go to a studio? How did it get made?

EW: Well, it got made very slowly thanks to the pandemic. I had to do things one track at a time,
and I couldn’t have a band in the studio, so we had to get one musician at a time in there to be safe
and so it took a couple of years to put this album together. It was frustrating at the time, but
looking back, it allowed me to really, really work on each track separately and think about did that
work? What do I need here? So it got made rather slowly.

BiTS: Like yourself, I moved from playing a washtub bass to playing the guitar. Listening to the

album as I have, it sounds to me as though maybe your guitar is tuned down a couple of tones.

EW: Well, on most tracks, it’s standard tuning. However, on one track, I’m playing a baritone
guitar.

BiTS: Ah, that’s what I thought it was.

EW: ‘Black Snake Moan’ is a baritone guitar and ‘Special Rider Blues’ is an open tuning, so that
sounds lower, but all the rest are pretty much standard tuning, standard pitch. The slide stuff

sounds a little lower, too, because it’s an open tuning.

BiTS: It was ‘Black Snake Moan’ that I was listening to and I thought that’s tuned down a bit.