Blues Moments in Time...

In this episode of Blues Moments in Time, January 12 steps forward not as a day of tragedy or legislation, but as a celebration — a date stamped with beginnings, resilience, and the way we choose to remember. At the center is Ruth Brown, the “girl who sang the blues,” whose birthday becomes a kind of living memorial. We follow her journey from sneaking out to teenage club gigs, through car crashes, industry neglect, and years working as a domestic, to her return as a celebrated artist and fierce advocate for musicians’ rights.

We also look at how modern storytellers have intentionally claimed this date — from the online premiere of Ruth Brown, The Girl Who Sang the Blues to the way streaming-era commemorations teach audiences to mark the calendar and check back in with her story each year. January 12 shows how blues history is not frozen in old shellac, but constantly rewritten by how we share and revisit these lives.

Unlike many dates in music history, January 12 isn’t dominated by famous deaths from the blues pantheon. Instead, it leans toward birth, renewal, and the quiet politics of personal struggle — the contracts signed, the pay fought for, the respect demanded over a lifetime. In a genre so often marked by hard endings, January 12 stands as a reminder that some days on the blues calendar belong to the joy of what was born, not the sorrow of what was taken away.

Hosted by: Kelvin Huggins

Presented by: The Blues Hotel Collective

Keep the blues alive.

© 2026 The Blues Hotel Collective.

On this episode of Blues Moments in Time, January 11 becomes a day where labor strikes, inventions, and sidemen’s stories all braid into the blues. We start in 1912 with the “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where immigrant textile workers demanded not just wages to live on, but dignity and beauty in their lives—a cry that mirrors the emotional script of the blues: hard times, unfair systems, and a stubborn insistence on something better.

From there, we follow the Great Migration into the industrial Midwest, where factories, steel mills, and assembly lines became the backdrop for urban, electrified blues. Into this world arrives Lawrence Hammond, born January 11, 1895, whose Hammond organ would change the sound of church and club alike—its “churchy swell” bridging Sunday-morning gospel and Saturday-night moans, giving soul blues and blues rock one of their most powerful voices.

We also mark the birthdays of swamp-blues master Slim Harpo, alto sax man Tab Smith, New Orleans-rooted bandleader Wilbur de Paris, and Hammond himself—architects of grooves, horn lines, and tones that shaped mid-century Black music. Finally, we honor the passing of trumpeter Bob Enos of Roomful of Blues, a working-band stalwart whose horn kept big-band blues energy alive on stages and in studios. January 11 reminds us that the blues is built by workers, inventors, and “everyday geniuses” whose sounds carry both bread and roses in every note.

Hosted by: Kelvin Huggins

Presented by: The Blues Hotel Collective

Keep the blues alive.

© 2026 The Blues Hotel Collective.

January 10 runs like a hidden thread through blues history – a single date where beginnings and endings collide. On this day, the business language of Black music was quietly revolutionized by Jerry Wexler, who helped retire the “race records” label and usher in “Rhythm and Blues.” It’s the birthday of Max Roach, whose insistence that music could be a weapon for civil rights reshaped the climate in which blues artists told their truths. And it’s also the day the stage lights dimmed on one of the music’s fiercest architects, when Howlin’ Wolf left this world in 1976.

In this episode of Blues Moments in Time, we trace January 10 across the map – from Mississippi plantations and Southern barracks to Chicago’s Westside clubs and neighborhood bars where the amps still buzz. We meet Eddie “The Chief” Clearwater, who strapped rock and roll fire onto traditional blues, and Byron “Wildchild” Gibson, a working-band lifer who proves the music survives not just in legends, but in local rooms and late nights.

Through these intertwined stories, January 10 becomes more than a date on the calendar. It’s a lens on migration and memory, the fight against segregation, the politics of who gets named and who gets forgotten, and the constant tug-of-war between preserving the roots and chasing the next electric spark.

Hosted by: Kelvin Huggins

Presented by: The Blues Hotel Collective

Keep the blues alive.

© 2026 The Blues Hotel Collective.

In this episode of Blues Moments in Time, January 9 becomes less about a single record and more about the world the blues speaks to. We travel to Panama in 1964, where students marching to raise their flag in the U.S.-controlled Canal Zone sparked deadly riots and a national reckoning. Their fight for dignity and sovereignty mirrors the same emotional core that runs through the blues and the American Civil Rights Movement—a demand to be seen, heard, and treated as fully human.

Musically, we drop the needle on 1976, when Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” sat at the top of the UK charts, a snapshot of the moment when blues grooves, tones, and phrasing had seeped so deeply into rock that most listeners no longer heard them as “blues” at all—just the sound of popular music. The episode traces how the genre’s DNA quietly underpins rock, folk, and pop, even when the label disappears.

We also mark the birthdays of Joan Baez, Jimmy Page, and Dave Matthews—three very different artists who each carried the spirit of the blues into new spaces: protest folk, thunderous hard rock, and globally inflected jam-band improvisation. And in the silence of major recorded blues deaths on this date, we sit with what’s missing: the countless early blues voices who lived and died off the record, without obituaries or headstones. January 9 becomes a meditation on how the blues lives on in echoes, influences, and the stories history forgot to write down.

Hosted by: Kelvin Huggins

Presented by: The Blues Hotel Collective

Keep the blues alive.

© 2026 The Blues Hotel Collective.

In this episode of Blues Moments in Time, January 8 becomes a crossroads where battlefields, politics, and backbeats all meet. We start with the Battle of New Orleans and trace how a 19th‑century skirmish turned into the fiddle tune “The 8th of January” and, eventually, the hit “The Battle of New Orleans”—a piece of southern storytelling cut from the same cloth as the blues, capturing place, pride, and memory in melody.

From there, we move to 1964 and Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” declaration, a moment when the nation finally named the conditions that shaped the very communities who are the blues. We explore how the amplified, weary blues of the 1960s carried the tension between promise and betrayal, federal investment and ongoing displacement, hope and hard reality.

January 8 is also a musical birthday roll call: Tampa Red, “The Guitar Wizard” who helped define Chicago blues guitar; Elvis Presley, the rockabilly lightning rod who carried blues structures to a global stage while raising hard questions about credit and compensation; and Shirley Bassey, whose dramatic, orchestral pop still bears the unmistakable imprint of blues feeling.

And in the relative quiet of recorded deaths on this date, we sit with what’s missing—the unmarked graves, unknown dates, and lost stories of countless blues artists. January 8 reminds us that the blues is a river fed by remembered legends and forgotten lives alike, all flowing into the music we hear today.

Hosted by: Kelvin Huggins

Presented by: The Blues Hotel Collective

Keep the blues alive.

© 2026 The Blues Hotel Collective.