Betsy Siggins

Club 47 Staff Member and Founding Member of NEFMA

Betsy Siggins 4: Working for Ralph Rinzler was like going on a picnic, and he and Alan Lomax and my friend Bob Jones would do road trips down to the South, and that’s how the first black blues players came north. We were ready for it. We were astonished by it. I couldn’t watch those artists play more than a couple of songs when I would cry. I would feel the lonesomeness, the sadness, the deprived-ness of all southern blacks. These guys who were singing in front of churches, on the street, at house parties, rent parties, came with one suitcase, maybe, their Sunday church suit, one overcoat, maybe a hat, and a battered up guitar case, and then they’d get on the stage there and they couldn’t believe the attendance from the audience. It was worshipful that these men lived and made it through being a black man in the South and had never ever in their lives expected to be on a stage with kids who were thirty, forty, fifty years younger than some of them, to hear their stories.