The Album
San Francisco Blues Festival Vol. 2 gathers live performances taped at the annual West Coast blues gathering founded in 1973 by Tom Mazzolini, an event that grew from a single afternoon into the signature blues showcase of the Bay Area. Side one is given over to Chicago blues veteran Jimmy Rogers, the guitarist who helped define the postwar Chicago sound alongside Muddy Waters and who here fronts a band with fellow Chicagoan Louis Myers on second guitar, running through staples like a storming reading of a Jimmy Reed-style shuffle and his own signature ballad. Side two turns to the regional players the festival was built to spotlight: Seattle-based guitarist Isaac Scott, whose gospel-rooted playing had anchored the Pacific Northwest blues scene for years; Bay Area singer Charles Houff; barrelhouse pianist Big Joe Duskin, a Cincinnati boogie-woogie specialist then only recently rediscovered and touring after decades out of the spotlight; and Texas-bred guitarist Phillip Walker, a Clifton Chenier alumnus who had become one of the West Coast's most respected blues guitarists. Together the two sides function as a document of how the festival mixed name acts with hard-working regional veterans who rarely received wider exposure. The album stands as part of an informal oral history of American blues as it was being kept alive on the West Coast in the late 1970s, prized less for any single landmark performance than for capturing a moment and a community of musicians whose stories were otherwise going untold.