In this episode of Blues Moments in Time, January 18 isn’t about one famous record—it’s about the rooms, rituals, and lives that keep the blues breathing. We drop into Sunday night residencies in Los Angeles and small, snowbound rooms at the Thredbo Blues Festival, where two-hour sets and close-up stages turn ordinary evenings into living laboratories of the blues. Here, standards get bent back toward the 12‑bar truth, and the music exists as it always has: in the air between player and listener, undocumented but unforgettable.

We trace how, when January 18 falls on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the blues takes on an extra charge—used by teachers, preachers, and activists to connect field hollers to freedom songs, turning the 12‑bar form into testimony rather than nostalgia. The date becomes a hinge between the Delta’s private pain and the public push for civil rights, reminding us that the blues is not just entertainment, but evidence of how Black Americans turned suffering into sound.

January 18 also marks the births of Motown great David Ruffin and jazz drummer Al Foster, artists who carried the emotional vocabulary of the blues into soul hooks and behind-the-beat jazz grooves. And we sit with the losses of Harlem Renaissance trailblazer Gladys Bentley—tuxedoed, barrelhouse, and defiantly queer at the piano—and Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey, whose songs rode on blues changes and drifter stories all the way to the arenas.

Taken together, January 18 is a portrait of the blues as it really lives: in bar gigs and jam sessions that never make the textbooks, in voices and beats that don’t always call themselves “blues” but feel like it anyway, and in the quiet, consistent work of turning hard history into sound.

Hosted by: Kelvin Huggins

Presented by: The Blues Hotel Collective

Keep the blues alive.

© 2026 The Blues Hotel Collective.