On this episode of Time Signatures, host Jim Ervin welcomes distinguished Blues harmonicist, producer and songwriter, Bob Corritore. Bob stopped in to discuss his latest CD, ‘Somebody Put Bad Luck On Me’, but they also talk about Bob’s early years in music, his hosting duties as listening parties, his work with some of Chicago’s biggest names in the Blues, his weekly old school Blues radios show, and his Phoenix venue, ‘The Rhythm Room’. It’s a great interview with lots of fun and information.

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This is Time Signatures with Jim Ervin, a podcast and radio program presented by the Capital Area Blues Society in Lansing, Michigan. Most any contemporary musical style can trace its roots back to the blues. Time Signatures explores the blues and its musical connections with captivating interviews, lively discussions, and news from the world of the blues. And now, here he is, your host, Jim Ervin.

Well, yes, in fact, I am home and welcome to Time Signatures. I am your host, Jim Ervin. My guest this time around is quite the accomplished blues musician.

He was born in what he calls the hotbed of the blues in Chicago, Illinois. This young man first discovered the genre when he first heard Muddy Waters on the radio as a preteen.

And from that point forward, he followed the blues in every way possible, even hosting some listening parties with his friends where he served as dj.

Now that childhood stint paid off handsomely because not only has he followed his path into the blues as a harmonicist, a songwriter and a producer, he also has had a long standing blues radio program for nearly 40 years on KJZZ in Phoenix, Arizona. Now he's won a Blues Music Award, a Blues Blast Music Award, a Living Blues Award and a Keeping the Blues Live Award.

But he's also produced a Grammy nominated album for good measure. He is also the owner of the Rhythm Room in Phoenix. Bob Corritore. Man, that is a mouthful, my friend. Welcome to Time Signatures.

Thanks for the brilliant intro there and I hope I can live up to that in the interview. But an honor to be here with you. Thank you very much, Jim.

Well, very much a pleasure to have you here and I gotta tell you, I'm one of those dessert first guys. So I would love to talk to you about your CD that was just recently released.

I've purchased it, I have listened to it on Spotify and all I can say is wow, this is truly another home run.

Thank you very much. I'm really proud of it.

And I've done a number of albums with this kind of format of the Bob Courtor and Friends where I put a collection of songs together with some really great vocalists and bands and it gives me different harmonica assignments to play. So I get to find new and cool things to play with the different songs that I put myself in the middle of.

Part of what works about it is that I think I've become a better producer over time and I'm able to take a few more chances as far as some of the songs I select and go after. But I think what's really the success of it is just. But I'm working With so many great musicians, the singers are just spectacular.

The great rhythm sections and guitar players and piano players. And some of the song selections are great.

And part of that, as, you know, as a dj, you think about putting a show together and you want to sequence it in such a way that it's going to flow as a nice love song. Over the years, I. I put these things out and I really love all of them.

They're all like chapters of my life, but people seem extra responsive to this one. And again, I've taken a few more chances, I've done a few more things.

As we get older, we just look at things with maybe a little bit more of a maturity than we did before. But it's really a wonderful album and it's about songs. It's not necessarily about a bunch of harmonical lakes or a bunch of.

This is about playing as an ensemble and having everything work for the cause of what's trying to be communicated in the song. So anyway, that's how I'd look at that. And again, I think it's like having a blues festival in your living room.

When you put that on, you know, I'll name her up a little bit. Bobby Rush, Carl Weathersby, John Primer, Johnny Rawls, Lornetta Davis, Francine Reed. In a Greenleaf, we've got Tia Carroll. I'm.

I'm forgetting if you hear Willie Buck, Lori Bell, Oscar Wilson sings the title track and does an amazing job of that.

You know, Jimmy primetime Smith plays guitar on almost all the tracks and so his little efforts there, both in his lead guitar playing and some of the background work, are just spectacular. So anyway, I'm very proud of this one. I'm glad that you like it too. So that means a lot that I'm getting that love back. So thank you.

Oh, it's my pleasure. And I'm not just giving you props because we're talking. I truly have enjoyed listening to it from front to back and it was nothing but a lot of fun.

But I need to step back for a minute and I would like to have you tell me the story that first time that you heard Muddy on the radio. I'd love for you to talk about how that moment inspired you and ultimately shot you into a different direction.

I was 12 years old and I'd been listening to all the pop music at the time. You think about that time period and songs by Steppenwolf and the Doors and Jeff. They all were very blues based.

Yes, Proko Harriman, things like that. And I always enjoyed that aspect of it, of music in general, just to kind of move me.

And then all of a sudden I heard Muddy Waters doing the song Rolling Stone. And I go, this is everything that I love, that I've loved about this other music I've heard. But here it is in its purest form.

It just is knocking me out.

So, you know, within the week I collected my paper route money and I brought my bicycle to, to the downtown record shop and picked up a copy of Muddy Waters sale on. And it had just come out and I put it on and I heard all of this amazing music.

Not only song Rolling Stone, but then Coochie Coochie man and Call Stand up, all the great harmonica work of Little Walter doing I'm Ready and, and I just want to make love to you. And I just, I couldn't believe it. It just was. It was like a whole other awareness of how great music could be.

All of a sudden opened up, the door just opened up. I'm like, oh, this is just amazing.

And the ironic thing is to this day I don't think that there's a better record than that first one that I picked up. You know, I still can put it on and I get the same goosebumps that I got when I heard it. And so that became part of my high school soundtrack.

That, that particular record then, you know, by Junior Wells, who Demand Blues, Jimmy Rogers, Chicago Bound, Sonny Boy Williamson, the double record on Chess, all these cool things Records by B. B. King and Freddie King. And all of a sudden I'm like a total blues fan.

I'd stay in on Saturday nights as a high school student so I could hear the radio show from Northwestern University that played blues. And I'm just like, oh, that's amazing. So all of a sudden I'm like finding myself delving deeper and deeper into it.

And then the first blues concert I ever saw was right at my high school.

I. I was born in Chicago and then raised in the north suburb of Wilmette, and I went to New Trier east and first show I saw was actually at New Shore west, which was very close. It was. They had two campuses at that point, but it was the Sam Lay Blues Revival and it had Eddie Taylor and Detroit Junior Wild Child Butler and.

And this was the very first thing. It was in the high school auditorium on, on the night. And I just went there and was like, wow, this is so cool.

This is exactly what I've been hearing on the records, but live.

And then, you know, I get to see Otis Rush at Baron College I got to see the Memphis Blues Caravan, which was put on at Northwestern University, which had all the great country blues ours, Buckle White and Furry Lewis. Sleepy John Essence with Henry Nixon, had Joey Wilkins and Houston Stackhouse. And the list goes on.

So, you know, you could go to the local pizza place. And every Tuesday Blind Tom Brewer would play, you know. And so the blues was all around, you know, I was just there.

But I was too young to get into the clubs, right? Right. I was 18. Like, the drinking age was 19. I got a ID that said I was 19 before I was. And I started hitting the clubs.

I got to meet Coco Taylor, sit in with her band. I Young and JB Hutto and Magic Slim and all these great people. Of course, Muddy Waters was playing over at the Quiet Night and various places.

And Big Walter Horton, I could see over on Maxwell Street. And then later over at Blues, he'd do a regular Sunday night at Blues on Halstead. And you go there.

It'd be like going to harmonica church every Sunday night with that great tone. So, right. This was the journey that I had. It was pretty amazing. And eventually, you know, I'm not sitting with people. Eventually I got my first.

I'd been playing in other bands, but my first real deal Blues band was with Willie Buck. And Willie called me for a gig.

I show up and Lewis Myers and Dave Myers, who worked with Little Walter, Elmore James, former drummer, Odie Payne, Bison Smith. We had Earl Hooker's former piano player, Big Moose Walker.

And myself in the band will be saying, Lewis, I was a big fan of, you know, I was a friend of his, but I always looked at myself as like, you know, a student of his. And I go, louis, I don't think I should be on the stage with you. It was like, you're playing. Go on.

Lewis, on top being like greatest guitar players, was also one of the greatest harmonica players. So I was like, intimidated to a point. But all of a sudden I was in.

I was part of this group and everybody was connected and we all had a blast and hang out after the gig and stuff. So it was a great experience. And, you know, I just played with Willie Buck last weekend. We're still hanging out and making music together.

So blues has that kind of enduring quality. Although, sadly, we just lost Tail Dragger.

Yes.

A lot of my friends, we lost Bill Perry. I'm over here at the King Biscuit right now, and I'll be doing a tribute with some of his family members for. For Bill how and Mad Perry, you know.

So as I Get older. I'm now becoming more of the veteran. Where it used to be I would get the atta boys. Now I've got to give the attaboys or attitude, right?

You know, so it's. It's a different world. Anyway, I kind of skipped around there, but hopefully I answered your question.

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And I have to tell you, I enjoy hearing the stories about, you know, about how you started out and.

And I'm going to go back just a little bit here, though. When you first heard Muddy on the radio, you said that your younger brother gave you your first harmonica.

What do you recall about that first one and do you still have it today?

Well, now harmonica is kind of wear out, so at a point it got kind of broken, especially when you're learning how to play it, you probably misuse the reeds. They're a gentle thing. And you have to kind of coax them into the place where they bend.

But my brother had it and he had a little book of how to play harmonica. And he could bend the note and get the crying sound. And he showed me how to do that and I immediately took to. He goes, you're pretty good at that.

Why don't you just keep this harmonica? And here's the book. And so I just played from that point forward. He never played it again, but I just took it over and had a blast with it.

I lost a lot of friends my first couple years learning how to play harmonica. I play in the back of the bus and people say, courtroom, shut up. And they like, lock up, you know, piece of paper, throw it at me, get me to stop.

You couldn't get me to stop because I was on this path. And, you know, I would have my little cassette recorder and I turned it full volume.

I'd walk down the halls of my high school blaring out Muddy Waters and Big Walter Horton and Junior Wells and Sonny boy songs and Jimmy Rogers songs. I'm sure everybody thought I was complete freak, but I just didn't care, you know, it was just like I was on a mission to music. So anyway.

But again, I'm skipping around, but I hope I answered the question.

No, you're doing great. And you're listening to Time Signatures with Jim Ervin. My guest is Bob Corritore. Just absolutely enjoying a great conversation with him.

And we keep going round and around here talking about different parts of his career and how he got started. Started. I got to do one more area of your.

Your younger days because I love the story about your listener parties where you Played DJ for your friends. It kind of reminded me of my early days of DJing. Spinning Elton John on my cheapo record player.

When I was about nine years old, I would actually broadcast on a CB walkie talkie that my grandfather gave me. But what do you remember most about that time in your life? It had to be something that you felt was really important to you.

Yes, of course. Well, yeah, obviously I was in love with the music and I was also. I was a big record collector. Yeah, my record collection would grow.

I mean, each, each week, there would never be a week that I wouldn't go to the record store at least once or twice. You know, I'd always pick up new stuff and I'd always listen to it carefully. And you get your pet tracks that just knocked you out, right?

Things that, you know, unmistakably just the cool things, and you want to share those with other people.

So I have friends over and I play this track and that track, you know, of course, I take it off the turntable, put on another thing, but I got a great amount of joy and, oh, that song's really cool and that. So I really enjoyed that. And of course, that set the seeds of eventually doing a radio show.

But that's how it started, is that I just enjoyed that, you know, and I enjoyed, you know, the Chicago blues, I enjoyed the west coast blues, enjoyed, you know, some of the things that were the offshoots of the blues, some of the. The soul music that was close to the blues. So I, you know, I was there showing people these different aspects.

And, you know, I did that, you know, throughout my many years. And eventually I ended up getting a radio show. I got to do that for. Instead of four people in the living room.

I got to do it for thousands of people of the listenership of the station. So.

And you've been doing it for almost 40 years. I mean, that. And it's a five hour stint. I mean, I've done, I've done my homework and I would. I have to ask you, is it something that. Are you.

Are you able to get it on demand or is it strictly live?

Strictly live. They've. The station has opted not to do podcasts, I think, for, you know, performance rights reasons.

You know, I think they have to cover it in a different way if it's. If it's that way. But we had talked about it, but now it's strictly a live thing. And you can hear that if you're in Phoenix.

It's at 91.5 FM and it's Mountain Standard Time at 6 to 11pm on Sunday nights. If you're not in Phoenix, you could hear it, but you may have to transfer to your time zone, whatever, however it works out.

But you can hear it@kjzz.org so if that works for you, tune in please and you'll hear what I do. I do mainly a vintage show. So I'm playing. Almost 90% of what I'm playing is stuff from the 50s and 60s, which is really hard. Some pre war stuff.

Right. Some new releases in the older tradition. But it's a very historically traditional blues show. And so that's. That's what I do on there.

So I've done that now for 40 years that I've been doing that. You know what else is interesting, Jim, is that I'm still having a blast doing it. And I can tour and I can do all this stuff.

But when I'm sitting there and some of my shows are pre recorded because I'm touring a lot this year. But when I'm sitting back with that music and listening to it, it just gives me great joy. And I get to be with that music.

I get to spend time those five hours a week really involved in that music. And just always, it kind of keeps a wonderful perspective for me to be able to do that.

And each week I have different themes and might be Chicago blues slide guitar. It might be the harmonica work of Will Walter. It might be. I did a thing on Chess Records.

I did another thing on the Groove record label, a subsidiary of RCA Victor. Did all this cool R B stuff in the. In the late 50s.

So, you know, each week I'll have a different, sometimes two or three themes interwoven over the five hours. It's fun. I'll, you know, honor this artist or that artist with such music. So it's. It's a joy to be able to do that.

And I'm always searching for the new stuff. I'm always picking up new albums. And the problem, Jim, is I'm really running out of space in my house.

You know, it's like, where do I put all this stuff? Yeah, my shelves are completely full now. I've got boxes in front of them.

And pretty quick I'm going to have to figure out how I'm going to store all this stuff because it's just more than I can do. But I actually use my huge record collection on a weekly basis.

And it's got to be an incredible joy and thrill to go through and decide what you're going to do. Each week on your program. And you made a key statement here that you have a traditional blues program.

I wanted to ask you, because we've had multiple conversations with other folks that we've interviewed. And the story seems to be about the same. That traditional blues in the United States just didn't take hold as well as it did in Europe.

And I'm trying to figure out why that is the case. I mean, what's your take on that?

Okay. I have a slightly different way of putting it than you just put it there. Okay.

I think what it was is that blues, as it was created and as it was developed, was really black music for black people, that culture. And it spoke to that culture. It was performed by that culture.

And then at a point in time, Europe, who had an uncanny sense of the historical aspect of it, they started booking, like Big Bill Brunsi would go over and sanitary, Brownie McGee and some people during the folk boom. But then there's the American Folk Blues Festival and other festivals that would bring in some of the really cool Chicago or West coast artists.

The T Bone Walkers and the Muddy Waters and the Howler Wolfs.

Young bands like the Rolling Stones would go and they hear this music and get knocked out much in the same way that you and I got knocked out the first time I heard the blues.

Right.

And so all of a sudden, here's black music for a white audience. And then the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, to a point, they were very influenced by Little Richard and Chuck Berry.

They took this and they reprocessed it to their own filter. And they made it into pop music. And at pop music, they'd have the song credits. And next thing, you know, people would be delving into that.

And other things were happening too. Maybe because of Europe, maybe not. But, you know, with the folk boom, that was happening in the United States, too.

So John Lee Hucker and different people would play at that Waterman, who's so much as a big promoter. Getting a lot of the great country blues acts into these festivals that were very college student oriented.

So it became a different type of music enterprise. Enter just the whole interracial thing. And Paul Butterfield Blues Band. A white harmonica player with an interracial band.

Or Paul Oscher a couple of years later, joining an otherwise all black band in the Muddy Waters Band, playing at the pinnacle of the blues. All of that led to this kind of widening of the scope of who would be considered legitimate performing the blues and who could be the audience.

And then as soul music and other things became More of the image of the younger black population, some of the older blues that was coming from harder times. You know, we're talking about the civil rights movement, we're talking about all of the dues that black people paid.

Some of them wanted that fresh newness of what was happening at that point because it's symbolic to the struggles they were going through. So soul music was its own little statement of the power and the prowess of black music as blues was. But it was not, didn't have the same power.

People like B.B. King were able to transcend that with great hits like Thrill is Gone, which became a, you know, a pop hit.

It became a top selling pop hit, you know, to all audiences.

But so all of a sudden this music form that was once black music for black people became mainly black music for an interracial crowd and with an emphasis on marketing it to the white college students. So it gets off into an interesting place like I'm still loved in the black clubs, this and that.

Nowadays it's going even further in that direction because, you know, so many people that grew up listening to the hits of Bobby Bland, they're not getting out them. And so much of the music that's coming out nowadays is music that reflects what the younger generation has grown up around.

So it has all these modern elements. It has all this stuff. And who is the audience for this? It's an interracial audience that loves it and adores it.

Blues as heritage belongs to black people. Blues as an art form belongs to the universe. Blues as a form of entertainment belongs to its audience that will come and support it.

And blues as a business belongs to the bottom line. If you can put all those stars together and form a constellation, that's. That would be gold right there, Bob.

If I wanted to book you, buy your CDs or just check out Bob Kortor. Where can I find you?

I have a website which is bobcortor.com and it's spelled B O B C O R R I T O R E. So, you know, it's all just one word in the website. Or you can just Google my name and I've got that website. It's got amazing.

It's got a whole bunch of great photos of my heroes and my history of different things that I've done, different artists that I admire. I think you find it really enjoyable.

Or you can just find me on Facebook and I'm a regular poster on my fan page, which is not the one that's a friend requesting, it's the one that you just follow it so you can find a whole bunch of wonderful photos and stories and kind of keep up to date with the things I'm doing. Also, if you go to my website different than the Facebook page, you can also sign up my for my newsletter which comes out every week or other week.

Absolutely. Bob Corritoree, it has been a pleasure.

Thank you so much for joining us on Time Signatures and we are looking forward to checking into some more of your albums, the Vault series. Be able to check those out on the website and also start adding those to our collection.

But once again, I want to thank you so much for everything that you do for helping to keep the blues alive. Thank you, sir.

Jim thank you so much. I really enjoy your time today.

Very good. Well, that's going to wrap it up for this edition of Time Signatures with your host, Jim Ervin.

If you can find any way to help keep the blues alive, please by all means do. We'll see you next time on Time Signatures.

This has been Time Signatures with Jim Ervin, presented by the Capital Area Blues Society in Lansing, Michigan. For more information on CABS, visit capitalareablues.org. You can find this episode and past episodes at LCCconnect.org. The Time Signature's theme song, Michigan Roads, is used by permission and was written by Root Doctor featuring Freddie Cunningham. Until next time, keep on keeping the blues alive.