"The blues is just a feeling, but in musical terms, it's much more than that. The history of rock 'n' roll as we know it today makes a bee-line through the Mississippi Delta and the Texas Panhandle to Memphis and Chicago and all points in between...
From heavy metal to hard rock, Led Zep to the Beatles, the influence of the blues is seminal. Lo and behold, the blues itself, in its original form and with a herd of true-to-the-roots believers, is alive and well and travelling all over the country and the whole world in the form of bent-note crusaders playing the clubs and colleges, the small halls and the outdoor festivals, carrying it on, true to the twelve-bar."
NOE the G, Guitar World Editor
September 1988 issue



I can clearly remember my childhood Sundays, wherein my Dad and his cousins would play their instruments and just have fun. It didn't take a long time before I memorized their songs by heart. But I was just a kid then, and I always heard them, so there really was no choice. I would hum while I exchanged stationeries with my cousins, or while we played pogs (HAHA I remember I was such a geek, I spent my nights counting my pogs collection; my parents did not help at all because they kept bringing home tons of it every night, totally supporting me in my obsession).

I can't remember exactly when I started my love affair with the blues. Maybe it was the night when Daddy brought Kate and me to a certain gig, maybe it was when I heard the blues played live.

And I can't remember WHY I started loving this kind of music. For the true blues soldiers, it wasn't normal for young girls to delve into blues--- I was expected to listen to rnb, pop, rock, alternative, or whatever young kids listen to these days.

But then it isn't normal either to be living amidst hundreds of guitars and other musical instruments. All my life I've lived in a creative and musically-inclined environment, this has always been the world I've known and loved. Hearing screeching guitars has become a part of everyday, it's like literally living music. My Dad, as well as local and foreign blues musicians alike, has changed my view on certain things, and made me believe that music could be more than just what one hears.

The blues is unexplainable. It's like translating into guitar riffs what words cannot describe. It has a lot of heart. Without uttering anything, one can feel the intense emotions the guitarist is trying to convey. It's music at its finest. It is exactly what music ought to be.