Blues Society of Central PA - "In Our Backyard"

Ask an old-time musician and he'll likely tell you that the blues is a "feeling."   Ask a musicologist and you might hear something about the "12-bar" blues.   Ask a contemporary blues performer and you might still hear about 12 bars, but now more in terms of where and how often they play in the span of a good week or two.

The collection is a tribute to the working blues musicians of South Central Pennsylvania who crisscross the Mason-Dixon line on a regular basis playing the circuit of bars, hotels, clubs and showrooms that run from Harrisburg to Philly, straight south to Baltimore, down to Washington, D.C., and back around again.

Track list/sound clips

The CD is also available at Tickle My Senses in New Cumberland!

The blues started working it's way out of the South in the 1920's riding on the backs of itinerant musicians and spreading even further via phonograph records and radio.  Blues music that "began as an expression of African Americans' rural southern experience," writes the nation's leading blues scholar, David Evans (who has, by the way, family ties in Harrisburg), "migrated to the urban north" and evolved in myriad directions, though always maintaining it's essential character as an "intensely personal music." *

As you listen to the tracks on this CD, you'll experience blues across a range of eras and genres, a true reflection of th ebest players and the kinds of blues popular in Harrisburg's own backyard.   Acoustic ragtime, piedmont and Mississippi Delta, Chicago blues, full-tilt boogie, soul and gospel blues, Texas jump, swamp blues it's all here, ingredients in the quintessential South Central Pennsylvania blues mixture.

"The standard misconception about the blues is that it's sitting-around, crying-in-your-beer music," says Mitch Ivanoff of Krypton City Blues Revue.   "it is quite the antithesis of that... It's about sharing in the human experience and th ejoy of knowing you're not alone in this world... Blues is about life, and we're all living it." **

So, with ace bass-player and producing whiz Harry Werner at the helm, drop this "coin" into the slot and take a ride on the South Central blues line.

-- Jerry Zolten                                                 
Author, biographer of "The Dixie Hummingbirds"
  Producer, Fairfield Four and Isaac Freeman       

* The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to the Blues by David Evans, Perigee Press, 2005.
** Interviewed by Jon Ferguson in "Catching The Blues," Central PA Magazine, July 2003.