Folks, I was talking about Chicago. I wasn't talking about the whole Goddamn history of the blues. The scene IN Chicago!!!---Just mother- freakin' Chicago!!!! It was wonderful when I was young. That's all I was saying!!! That is what I was agreeing with Martin about! So there...!!!

Of course the acoustic blues that Sam Charters and others called the Country Blues were wonderful and were FIRST. Shit, I am not a moron about blues. For heaven's sake, those early guys (and some gals too) were the best --- all the way from Charlie Patton and Son H. and Bar-b-q Bob and everyone. I own all their music and everyone else mentioned here---and I listen to it whenever I can. I prefer it by far to the over-the-top electric stuff. Sure, they all came to Chicago to get away from from poverty, and the hookworms, and pickin' cotton, and too much cholesterol in their diets, and building levees, and racism, and Southern attitudes, and, as Walter Vinson of the Mississippi Sheiks told me personally when I tape recorded him in Chicago in the early '60s, "Art, I left there to get away from smellin' mule farts!!" -- He was talking about walking behind the mule plowing row after row in one hundred and ten degree heat, and breaking up the clods of dirt with his two bare feet. It was all of the above -- and what you said too!

But Chicago is Chicago--and it was just cool as all hell to grow up in that place then.

Love,

Art