Real Conversations and Oral History from the Blues Community

Talking Blues explores how the blues works — how lived experience, musical tradition, personality, place, craft, and circumstance become expression.

Hosted by broadcaster Matt Cooper, the podcast documents firsthand conversations with blues musicians about their lives and their music: the people who influenced them, the instruments they chose, the roads they travelled, the records they made, and the experiences that shaped what eventually came out of the speakers.

Some are widely known. Others are still being discovered. All are part of the lineage.

These conversations also serve another purpose: oral history. Talking Blues preserves the voices and stories of the people who make the music while they are still here to tell them — creating a permanent record for listeners, researchers, musicians, and future generations.

The question underneath it all is simple: Why does the blues affect us as it does — and how does a human experience become the blues?

Matt Cooper, Host & Archivist, Talking Blues