David Evans in an interview: “Blues is a tradition that has now lasted for more than a hundred years!”

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Musicologist, researcher, singer, and guitarist, David Evans has been traveling the roads of the American South since the 1960s to collect the memory of the blues. A few months after the release of his book Going Up the Country, he was the special guest at the Salaise Blues Festival, where he gave a remarkable lecture. We took the opportunity to talk with this key figure of the African American musical tradition — all under the cameras of Ti and Bo…

📹 David Evans: The full interview video 👇

✒️ The interview 👇

Hello David. Thank you for giving us a bit of your time. We’re here at the Salaise Blues Festival, a festival you came to in 1989 with Johnny Shines. You gave a talk here, “The Guitar in the Blues of the Southern United States”, at the Elsa Triolet media library. What would you like people to take away from that talk?

Well, the blues is a tradition that has now lasted for more than a hundred years. I was fortunate to meet some of the musicians who were part of the first or second generation to play the blues. Some were even born in the nineteenth century. I began my research in the 1960s, and here I am in 2025, still doing research, still writing. And of course, along the way, I learned to perform music by watching and listening to many traditional musicians. Some of them were famous, like Son House; others were not so well known, just local musicians I came across during my fieldwork. So I guess, in some ways, I try to carry on the tradition myself.

From the Mississippi Delta to urban blues

You published a book in 2022 titled Going up the Country. In your view, what are the characteristics of Southern blues compared to styles like Delta blues or Chicago blues?

I did research in the Delta and in other parts of Mississippi and Louisiana, some other areas too, but mostly in Mississippi and parts of Louisiana, and then in the city of Memphis. The places where I did my research were small towns and rural areas, and there, most of the people were quite poor and couldn’t support bands. So a lot of the singers were solo performers, someone with a guitar, or maybe a duo: guitar and harmonica, or two guitars.

But when singers and other people began to migrate to the cities like Memphis, Jackson (Mississippi), New Orleans, and of course up North to Chicago or out to Los Angeles, things started to change. Especially in the 1940s and 1950s, after World War II, there was a lot of migration because agricultural work had become mechanized and they didn’t need as many workers. So people moved to the cities where there were jobs, and they began to play electric guitars and form bands, four or five pieces.

So the Chicago Blues became louder, more of a band style, and of course, very competitive – more commercial, too. All of the musicians were hustling to make money in the clubs or by playing on the streets. But there were a lot of clubs in Chicago, and people had money. Factory workers had money to spend on the weekends, so a very active scene developed in the cities. In fact, today – and in recent decades – blues has become more of an urban music.

Is it precisely because they were playing solo that they developed such a percussive, rhythmic style? Earlier, when you played, it almost felt like you were doing drums and guitar at the same time…

Some of the guitar styles, especially in Mississippi and that area, are very percussive. Even with the slide, using a bottleneck, it’s a percussive style because it’s a hard surface on the metal strings. You can snap the strings with your fingers, and yes, a lot of blues singers tried to create percussion that way. And of course, they would also tap their feet.

The scenes where they played were very noisy, whether at little house parties, outdoors, or on a porch. Not everybody was listening. Some people were dancing, some were talking, some were yelling. It was a very volatile environment. So a lot of people didn’t listen to the whole song. They might hear one verse, feel that, and then go off to talk to somebody else. That kind of music was part of an overall environment, a social environment.

A central figure … Tommy Johnson

In your research since the 60s, there’s one figure that stands out as central — Tommy Johnson. What made his contribution to the music so special?

Tommy Johnson was the central figure of my early research because so many musicians had learned from him and learned his songs. Many of his songs were quite memorable, I would say, either for their guitar parts or their melodies. He had a beautiful voice, and he could also sing in the falsetto range, which impressed other singers. His singing and his music made a strong impression.

I think I met and recorded 10 or 12 musicians who had learned from him. That included his brother, a cousin, a nephew of the woman he married, a neighbor, two nephews and several friends and fellow musicians. So he was a central character in a portion of the blues tradition, and he traveled through different parts of Mississippi and Louisiana as well.

You’re often compared to Alan Lomax and, like him, you went out to meet these musicians in their homes, with their families, sometimes in their kitchens. Was it difficult to get them to open up to you?

I knew Alan Lomax, and he was a great inspiration to me in my early research. He did some great work. There were other older folklorists too, like Harry Oster, the man who found Robert Pete Williams in prison. I was inspired by the work they had done in the 1940s and 1950s.

Sometimes there were difficulties, but most of the musicians were very friendly and quite impressed that someone would come all the way from California to meet them and hear them play music. The name Tommy Johnson opened many doors for me as well, because people had good memories of him. He had died ten years before I made my first research trip.

There were some who weren’t so friendly at first. Maybe they were suspicious, and that’s understandable. They had experienced relationships with local white people that were always exploitative and unequal. And of course, I was young, and they were older. But even then, they were used to calling white people Mister. I was Mister Dave, even though some of them were old enough to be my grandfather. That was awkward for me because I didn’t come from the South, and I didn’t understand those customs.

But it was also a time of change. The civil rights movement had just achieved some important successes. The Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act had been recently passed. Still, the mentality and customs in that region were from an earlier time. So it was a period of transition. But most people were very glad to talk to me and perform for me.

Sometimes I would pay a little bit of money. These were mostly poor people, and they needed the money. Sometimes they asked for it, of course. Normally, when they played blues at parties or events, they would get tips or a small payment and almost always alcohol too. It wasn’t required, but it was part of the music’s context. Beer or whiskey, that was common. One musician I met was a bootlegger. I talked about him in my lecture. And another one made alcohol himself. Moonshine, I call it.

These are incredible life stories, especially compared to the image of today’s professional bluesman. Were there any stories that particularly moved you when you were immersed in these bluesmen’s daily lives?

As I said in my lecture, one musician, Roosevelt Holts, was a bootlegger. He would buy whiskey and wine in a nearby town where it was legal to sell, then bring it back to his own town where it was illegal. It wasn’t just illegal to sell or buy, but really even to drink alcohol. People knew he had it, so they would come to his house, and he would sell it. He didn’t drink himself; he had ulcers in his stomach and had given it up. But he still sold alcohol.

He had also spent a few years with Tommy Johnson. Tommy had married Roosevelt’s cousin, so Roosevelt followed Tommy and his wife around. For a few years, he was more or less a professional musician. Then he got into trouble. He had a rivalry with someone, ended up killing the man, and went to prison. After that, he mostly did industrial and farm work, and played music on the weekends.

Most of these musicians played only on weekends. A few were full-time musicians, but there weren’t many opportunities to perform during the week. People were working hard, either in the fields or in factories, and they had to get up early in the morning. They were too tired after work to go out. But on the weekends, especially on Friday and Saturday nights, people would go out to drink, party, listen to blues, dance, and meet men or women. That was when the musicians could earn some money by playing in those social settings.

What would be your wish to help the new generation keep the spirit of the blues alive?

Blues today has become international music. Its history is, of course, the music of Black Americans, and it still holds some meaning and some acceptance within the Black community. But Black American music has always been evolving. Before blues, there were spirituals and ragtime, and then alongside blues came jazz, followed by rhythm and blues, soul music, rap, and now hip hop.

Today, we are also exposed to many different kinds of international music. You can go on YouTube and find anything from anywhere in the world. So blues now, I think, is a well-respected part of international music. It holds the same kind of status as reggae, tango, jazz, or any other major musical tradition. But it also has a rich history. Most of the historical styles of blues have been recorded, and in some cases we even have video.

Young people today can both listen to and watch contemporary blues musicians and singers. But they should also pay attention to the historical material. I think it would be great if some people tried to keep those older styles alive as part of the contemporary scene. When you compress the history into the modern world, it brings a lot of variety to the blues. Hearing and seeing all those different styles adds depth, and it’s all available now—on recordings, on YouTube, across the internet. It’s easy.

In the 1960s, when I was starting out, it was difficult. There were maybe only twenty blues albums you could find, and maybe two books about the subject. You could become an expert in just one month of reading and listening—you knew as much as anyone else did. Of course, the musicians themselves knew it from a very different angle, because it came from their lives and their communities.

And because everything always ends in music…

There’s this guitar next to us — would you agree to end with some music? But first, one last question: does the pendant you wear around your neck have a particular story?

No, it’s just something my wife found for me in a shop. You can carry something or whatever. I keep mine empty. But it’s. But it’s. It’s a guitar. Guitar case. I guess so. I wear that most of my shows, you know.

On stage : “The Poor Boy, a Long Ways from Home »

It’s usually played with a slide, like a bottleneck, a glass bottle, or a metal tube. Some people would even use the back of a jackknife to play it. It’s a hobo song. People used to ride the trains in boxcars with their guitars, go to a new town, and play at the railroad station or on a street corner. Then they’d get back on the train, head to the next place, and play for tips. This song probably comes from the earliest blues, maybe from the very beginning of the 20th century, so it’s more than a hundred years old. I’ve seen several people play it. One man, named Herb Quinn, played it with a knife. He was born in the 19th century as well. So, we’ll give it a try.