Blues Moments in Time...

January 10 runs like a hidden thread through blues history – a single date where beginnings and endings collide. On this day, the business language of Black music was quietly revolutionized by Jerry Wexler, who helped retire the “race records” label and usher in “Rhythm and Blues.” It’s the birthday of Max Roach, whose insistence that music could be a weapon for civil rights reshaped the climate in which blues artists told their truths. And it’s also the day the stage lights dimmed on one of the music’s fiercest architects, when Howlin’ Wolf left this world in 1976.

In this episode of Blues Moments in Time, we trace January 10 across the map – from Mississippi plantations and Southern barracks to Chicago’s Westside clubs and neighborhood bars where the amps still buzz. We meet Eddie “The Chief” Clearwater, who strapped rock and roll fire onto traditional blues, and Byron “Wildchild” Gibson, a working-band lifer who proves the music survives not just in legends, but in local rooms and late nights.

Through these intertwined stories, January 10 becomes more than a date on the calendar. It’s a lens on migration and memory, the fight against segregation, the politics of who gets named and who gets forgotten, and the constant tug-of-war between preserving the roots and chasing the next electric spark.

Hosted by: Kelvin Huggins

Presented by: The Blues Hotel Collective

Keep the blues alive.

© 2026 The Blues Hotel Collective.

In this episode of Blues Moments in Time, January 9 becomes less about a single record and more about the world the blues speaks to. We travel to Panama in 1964, where students marching to raise their flag in the U.S.-controlled Canal Zone sparked deadly riots and a national reckoning. Their fight for dignity and sovereignty mirrors the same emotional core that runs through the blues and the American Civil Rights Movement—a demand to be seen, heard, and treated as fully human.

Musically, we drop the needle on 1976, when Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” sat at the top of the UK charts, a snapshot of the moment when blues grooves, tones, and phrasing had seeped so deeply into rock that most listeners no longer heard them as “blues” at all—just the sound of popular music. The episode traces how the genre’s DNA quietly underpins rock, folk, and pop, even when the label disappears.

We also mark the birthdays of Joan Baez, Jimmy Page, and Dave Matthews—three very different artists who each carried the spirit of the blues into new spaces: protest folk, thunderous hard rock, and globally inflected jam-band improvisation. And in the silence of major recorded blues deaths on this date, we sit with what’s missing: the countless early blues voices who lived and died off the record, without obituaries or headstones. January 9 becomes a meditation on how the blues lives on in echoes, influences, and the stories history forgot to write down.

Hosted by: Kelvin Huggins

Presented by: The Blues Hotel Collective

Keep the blues alive.

© 2026 The Blues Hotel Collective.

In this episode of Blues Moments in Time, January 8 becomes a crossroads where battlefields, politics, and backbeats all meet. We start with the Battle of New Orleans and trace how a 19th‑century skirmish turned into the fiddle tune “The 8th of January” and, eventually, the hit “The Battle of New Orleans”—a piece of southern storytelling cut from the same cloth as the blues, capturing place, pride, and memory in melody.

From there, we move to 1964 and Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” declaration, a moment when the nation finally named the conditions that shaped the very communities who are the blues. We explore how the amplified, weary blues of the 1960s carried the tension between promise and betrayal, federal investment and ongoing displacement, hope and hard reality.

January 8 is also a musical birthday roll call: Tampa Red, “The Guitar Wizard” who helped define Chicago blues guitar; Elvis Presley, the rockabilly lightning rod who carried blues structures to a global stage while raising hard questions about credit and compensation; and Shirley Bassey, whose dramatic, orchestral pop still bears the unmistakable imprint of blues feeling.

And in the relative quiet of recorded deaths on this date, we sit with what’s missing—the unmarked graves, unknown dates, and lost stories of countless blues artists. January 8 reminds us that the blues is a river fed by remembered legends and forgotten lives alike, all flowing into the music we hear today.

Hosted by: Kelvin Huggins

Presented by: The Blues Hotel Collective

Keep the blues alive.

© 2026 The Blues Hotel Collective.

In this episode of Blues Moments in Time, we zoom in on January 7—a date that captures the blues in motion: migrating, electrifying, protesting, and reinventing itself. We follow the Great Migration as it carries the solitary acoustic blues of the Mississippi Delta into the crowded streets of Chicago, where the music plugs in, turns up, and becomes the raw, urban sound of Chicago blues and the backbone of “race records” that sold not just songs, but stories of escape and aspiration.

At the heart of the episode is Muddy Waters’ January 7, 1954 recording of “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man”—a stop-time, chest-thumping declaration that helped define electric Chicago blues and laid a blueprint for the rock and roll revolution. Along the way, we meet Alabama-born DIY trailblazer Bob Jenkins and bassist Rod Hicks of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, whose work bridged musical innovation and the Civil Rights era’s push for integration.

We also mark the losses of British blues sparkplug Cyril Davies and soul great James Carr, tracing how their sounds—whether through the British blues boom or the aching honesty of “The Dark End of the Street”—carry the same stories of struggle, resilience, and hope. January 7 becomes a living snapshot of the blues as coded protest, cultural migration, and a history still humming beneath modern music.

Hosted by: Kelvin Huggins

Presented by: The Blues Hotel Collective

Keep the blues alive.

© 2026 The Blues Hotel Collective.

Join Kelvin Huggins as he dives deep into the tangled roots and resonant echoes of blues history.

In this episode of Blues Moments in Time, we zero in on January 6—a day where blues-soaked music crashes headlong into cultural conservatism, joyful pop spectacle, and raw political truth. From Elvis Presley being filmed only from the waist up on national TV to contain his “blues-infused” energy, to a studio audience spontaneously inventing the “YMCA” dance on American Bandstand, we explore how music keeps testing the limits of what the mainstream will accept.

We trace the blues back to its roots in Southern work songs and prison fields, where it emerged as a voice of protest and survival, a first draft of the story later sung by the anthems of the Civil Rights Movement. Along the way, we drop the needle on key January 6 milestones: Frampton Comes Alive, Pink Floyd beginning Wish You Were Here, the Rolling Stones’ first headlining tour, and Carly Simon’s chart-topping “You’re So Vain.”

We also mark the births of Kim Wilson and Earl Scruggs, and honor the passing of giants like Dizzy Gillespie and Lou Rawls—artists who carried the blues’ spirit of defiance, innovation, and soul into new musical worlds. January 6 becomes more than a date; it’s a snapshot of how the blues keeps pushing, protesting, and pulsing through modern music.

Hosted by: Kelvin Huggins

Presented by: The Blues Hotel Collective

Keep the blues alive.

© 2026 The Blues Hotel Collective.