BLUES CRUISE
Over lonesome highways, high-speed wanderers search for the roots of the blues. Led by ZZ Top frontman and blues guitar legend Billy Gibbons, The Blues Cruise uncovers the history of the blues as we journey along the back roads and blue highways of America.
Driving the Kopperhed, his souped-up and super-charged 1950 Ford, Gibbons will take us along on an odyssey tracing the roots of the music that inspired ZZ Top. Along the road, he’ll visit the places that gave birth to the legends of the blues and talk to those who still carry on this rich musical tradition.
Motors and music will blend together as the road stretches out. The syncopation of the Ford V8 provides the perfect rhythm for the hard driving tunes that will jump start our trip into the heartland of American Blues.
We’ll see the juke joints, dilapidated barrooms, shacks, street corners and rudimentary recording studios that launched the careers of Sonny Boy Williamson, Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and countless others who became musical icons.
It’s an extraordinary opportunity for the audience to connect with this amazing American music. Gutsy, hard, melting blues will be created in a way no one has ever seen as Gibbons plugs in his guitar and swaps licks with the musicians he meets. This is not a studio session; this is the real deal.
When the brief sessions end, it’s back on the road. Along the way, a few other blues-crazed motor maniacs, like Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, will meet up with Gibbons on his blues tour.
This multi-part series will be structured like the ultimate road trip as Billy Gibbons paints a living history of the blues while traveling the dusty roads of the South.
His trip will begin in Austin, Texas, and move to his home town of Houston, where Billy Gibbons will take us on a personal journey of the region, its people, and the clubs and bars where he and his band mates were first introduced to the blues.
Next, Billy will ramble on down the road to New Orleans, where the city’s cultural diversity opened up another chapter of the blues, combining Western influences and African tradition to create a unique sound that is still heard on Bourbon Street today.
Heading north on Highway 61, Gibbons will drive into the very heart of blues country, the Mississippi Delta, where legends like Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters lived, worked, played and died. It was where the blues took root among the low red clay hills and cotton fields as sharecroppers, began to tell their stories in songs that rang out all along the Delta. Gibbons will visit with the men and women who continue the Delta Blues tradition, hear the stories of the past and discover how this area spawned a unique American art form.
Back on the road, Billy will visit Memphis, the musical capital of the Delta, where blues musicians from all over the South came to record their songs each influencing the other to create a unique sound. This is one of the places where the history of the blues was preserved on vinyl while being created in the clubs along fabled Beale Street, also called “the meanest street in America” and “Murder U.S.A.” It’s been said that the Devil himself lived on Beale Street, and the blues was his music.
Gibbon’s will wrap up his odyssey in Chicago, where Southern blacks migrated to escape the racism of the South and find good factory jobs. The blues followed them into the city where both were transformed by the urban landscape, creating yet another distinctive sound that can still be heard today all along Maxwell Street and all over the world.
The Blues Cruise is a rockin’ salute to the people and places that created, inspired and still live the blues.
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