The Original American Folk Blues Festival

This record documents the very first American Folk Blues Festival, the touring package that promoters Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau assembled to bring authentic American blues to European audiences for the first time, recorded in Hamburg in October 1962. It gathers the leading voices of that inaugural tour side by side: the deep piano blues of Memphis Slim, the jump-and-swing guitar of T-Bone Walker, the country-blues interplay of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, the raw electric sound of John Lee Hooker, and the Chicago harmonica style of Shakey Jake, all shaped behind the scenes by bassist and songwriter Willie Dixon. For most of these artists this was their first appearance before a European audience, and the record captures the energy of musicians who had spent careers playing for segregated American audiences suddenly performing for an audience hearing this music live for the first time. The tour and this documentation of it are now credited with helping ignite the European blues boom of the 1960s, feeding directly into the British blues revival that produced the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds and their peers. Its importance to the genre lies less in any single performance than in its role as a historical bridge, carrying the blues out of the American South and Chicago clubs and onto European stages and record players. The festival itself became an annual institution that ran for decades, and this LP stands as the founding document of that legacy, prized by collectors and blues historians as the first recorded evidence of the series.