Q&A
Buffalo Nichols on discovering the blues, travelling Europe, and the one song he stopped playing…
DUSTIN COHEN, PAUL NATKIN/GETTYIMAGES
What first attracted you to the blues?
There was a guitar in the house and it belonged to my older sisters. I picked it up and it just felt natural. Blues was just something that came from my curiosity about the guitar. I wanted to play everything I heard, and my mom had a lot of blues albums, like Robert Cray’s Strong Persuader. That was one that everybody had in their house. I also remember Riding With The King by BB King and Eric Clapton. It was stuff you’d find in any collection. But the most important one for me was the boxset Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues, which was great. It’s from a time before the internet became what it is now, so it was good to be able to dive into all these different parts of the history. I started playing along with that stuff and it just clicked.