Love That Album Podcast Episode 169 - Interview with Pauline Bailey, author of Blues Portrait – A Profile of the Australian Blues Scene

Buddy Guy put out an album in 1991 called Damn Right I Got The Blues. The song sounds like so much of a form of catharsis. However, blues can also represent a form of celebration. There's pre-war country blues, jump blues, swamp blues.... There's blues styles from Chicago, Texas, Louisiana and other American regions. The blues is not one thing. It's old...it's contemporary. It's relaxed...it's heart pumping. It has old and young practitioners. It has iconic practitioners and some bloke playing it at your local pub.

Welcome to episode 169 of Love That Album.

Obviously, the most famous blues musicians are those from the US and from the UK. Here in Australia, however, there's been a long tradition of musicians who've devoted themselves to the blues, be it through the pre-war stylings of The Paramount Trio, the Chicago style of Collard Greens and Gravy or....the hard-boogie style of Carson. Blues lovers here believe that there is something uniquely Australian about how blues is performed here....tyranny of distance making it gritty or something like that.

In 2019, artist and blues lover Pauline Bailey took it upon herself to record an oral history of Australian blues by speaking to a plethora (as Max Crawdaddy would have it) of musicians about their connection to local blues music. In 2023, Pauline has just released Volume 4 of these incredible books with no intention of stopping. Many are well known (Diesel, Jeff Lang, Ross Wilson, Mal Eastick, Mike Rudd), some not so much......all have fascinating stories to tell about how music came into their lives, how they've pursued it, and where it took them. These books are an invaluable resource into a side of Australian music history not previously tackled. The books even feature chapters devoted to some past LTA guests (Shane Pacey, Charles Jenkins, Anthony Shortte, Sarah Carroll, and Chris Wilson).

My huge thanks to Pauline for joining me to discuss her work and her devotion to the music and stylists she's immortalised in print. If you wish to grab a copy of any of her books, you can track them down at https://store15455084.ecwid.com/Books-c40041069

Download this episode of LTA from your podcast app of choice. The wider back catalogue of episodes can also be found at http://lovethatalbumpodcast.blogspot.com

Love That Album is proudly part of the Pantheon Podcast network. Go to http://pantheonpodcasts.com to check out all their great shows.

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