John Long

John Long’s uncanny capability to appear to be a prewar country blues participant — even while he plays first blues items he wrote himself or along with his older brother Claude Long — makes his music sound both just like a facsimile from the 1920s and early-’30s blues 78s he so treasures while somehow simultaneously sounding refreshingly contemporary, maybe because no one plays this sort of throwback blues anymore, at least not using the treatment and precision that Long provides to it. Long was created in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1950, and was raised hearing his mother’s jazz and R&B 78s, as well as the scratchy durability of the older discs filtered straight into his musical DNA. Before he was a good teen, Long had been racking your brains on how exactly to play nation blues tracks on guitar. Together with his sibling Claude (who also performed acoustic guitar), he shaped the Mystics in the first ’60s to try out contemporary rock and roll & move and R&B materials, but both brothers had been drawn increasingly towards the older blues audio, and Long quickly realized he previously discovered his creative house in the music from the prewar acoustic blues period. He shifted to Chicago in the first ’70s, where he was mentored by Homesick Wayne Williamson and started playing regional gigs. After viewing Long perform during this time period period, none apart from Muddy Waters proclaimed Long to become “the very best youthful nation blues musician playing today.” Beyond a couple program appearances plus some homemade demonstration tapes (Longer on Blues premiered as an unbiased cassette record in 1999), Longer did no documenting, however. That transformed when a demonstration tape of Long’s discovered its method to Randy Chortkoff, mind of Delta Groove Information. Chortkoff was struck by the energy of Long’s edition of the previous nation blues, and agreed upon him towards the label. A full-length Compact disc, Lost & Present, made an appearance from Delta Groove in 2006. It had taken Long a complete decade to provide his next record, Stand Your Surface, which made an appearance on Delta Groove in 2016.