Here is a brief excerpt of the review:
Most of the blues greats are gone now or, like B.B. King, are so old they can barely stand (the venerable Pinetop Perkins is now a sprightly 97 years-old). Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, Albert Collins, Willie Dixon, Albert King, Sonny Boy Williamson – they are all but faces on CD jewel cases, and their legacy is fading. After an inrush of reverential second-generation British and American bluesmen: Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Johnny Winter, Peter Green, Paul Butterfield, Rory Gallagher, and John Mayall – who were also great in their own right — the blues as an art form is dying. With the advent of rap, hip-hop, and electronica, there seems to be no apparent third or fourth generation musicians to take the place of the greats. I suppose it could be argued that there are less and less actual “musicians” of any stripe in the squalor and abject compositional poverty of the discordant wasteland that passes for music in the 21st century.
But before the blues passes into the realm of musical extinction, a dead 12-bar language phrased only by scholarly musicologists in the sterile confines of college conservatories, it would do us all well to savor the tart bite of albums such as Muddy “Mississippi” Waters Live. And give your kids a guitar or harmonica rather than a PS3 or Wii for their birthdays. Who knows, they may catch a spark that will relight the musical darkness.
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