Music Magazine The Blues Collection Sixth Edition Vorige editie

The Blues magazine started off as an offshoot of Classic Rock magazine in June 2012. Classic Rock had been covering blues rock artists for years, with the occasional feature on an original bluesman like Muddy or Wolf, but the burgeoning new scene made us wonder if blues needed its own magazine. Sure, Classic Rock could cover Joe Bonamassa every now and again, but to also cover Walter Trout, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Jonny Lang, the Royal Southern Brotherhood, Joanne Shaw Taylor etc etc was going to take quite a few more pages.

The success of Classic Rock’s first ever cover story with Joe Bonamassa gave us confidence that it could work. That story is included in this collection, as the story that gave birth to The Blues magazine. (It, and the story about Jimi’s Are You Experienced, are the only stories here that weren’t originally published in The Blues mag itself.)

The magazine ran from 2012 to 2016 under the editorship of Ed Mitchell (and special mention must be made here of Art Editor Steven Goldring and Dep Ed Emma Johnson).

What you have in your hands is a collection of some of the mag’s finest moments – and there are many fine moments to choose from. There’s great writing on – and some amazing photographs of – the genre’s biggest stars: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Gary Moore, ZZ Top, Howlin’ Wolf… And their stories and voices resonate still – honest, authentic, talented, aware, musical.…

You can always tell real music fans. It doesn’t matter what got them into music in the first place, their natural love and thirst for fresh sounds and greater understanding turns them into time travellers. They may be a teenage guitarist who picked up a Telecaster because of Green Day, but they soon read that Green Day reference The Clash, and that sends them backwards, where they learn that the Clash liked The Who and The Who liked Mose Allison and R&B and… everything ends up at the blues.