Ruth Davies' Blues Night with Elvin Bishop
Nancy Wright, tenor saxophone; Elvin Bishop, guitar; Mike Schermer, guitar; Chris Burns, keyboards; Ruth Davies, bass; Ndugu Chancler, drums

Wednesday, July 22, 7:30 pm
Dinkelspiel Auditorium
Tickets: $28 general | $14 students

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VIDEO: Elvin Bishop at Ground Zero Blues Club

Listen: Elvin Bishop – "Blues Rolls On"

Listen: Elvin Bishop – "Night Time is the Right Time"

Back by popular demand, bassist Ruth Davies’s Blues Night is always a festival highlight. Davies has earned serious blues credentials, gigging with such greats as Charles Brown, John Lee Hooker, and Jimmy Witherspoon, and she brings together a sensational lineup of musicians each year at Stanford to celebrate the blues. This year’s special guest is Elvin Bishop, a consummate bluesman whose slide guitar has thrilled listeners for more than 45 years. Growing up on a farm in Iowa, Bishop fell in love with the blues on the radio. When he left home as a young man he followed the music to Chicago and immersed himself in the city’s thriving electric blues scene. Bishop made several hit recordings after moving to San Francisco in the late 1960s, including the famous "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" in 1976. He has continued to record and tour regularly since then, and his 2008 album The Blues Rolls On, which featured all-stars like B.B. King, James Cotton, and George Thorogood, was nominated for a Grammy award for the year’s best traditional blues album.

“Elvin has become the most respected and beloved artist to come out of the 60s blues-rock explosion.”

– All About Jazz

Elvin Bishop website

Q&A with Elvin Bishop

What is the first recording you remember hearing as a child?
We didn’t have electricity when I was a kid. It was something on the radio, probably country.

What job would you have if you weren’t a blues musician?
Farmer. I raise a big garden.

What is your favorite food?
Fresh vegetables from my garden.

What’s the strangest experience you’ve ever had on the bandstand?
A guy got shot and killed when I was playing in a blues club on 51st Street in Chicago around 1961. The club owner told me to just keep playing.

What’s the most exotic place you’ve traveled to as a musician?
Hong Kong or Buck’s Pocket, Alabama.

If you could play with any other musician, living or dead (with whom you have not played), who would it be and why?
Blind Lemon Jefferson because I love his stuff.

What hobbies do you have?
I read and write Japanese as a hobby.

Who is your greatest musical influence?
There are so many from gospel to old blues, R&B, new blues, jazz… I just keep my ears open all the time.

If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have three recordings with you, what would they be?
Muddy Waters’s first album; Frostbite by Albert Collins; My Jug & I by Percy Mayfield come to mind.

When did you become interested in music, and what circumstances or events led to your becoming a professional musician?
I became interested in music in Junior High school when I saw that the girls liked guitar players. I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where it wasn’t accepted to hang out with musicians of color, so I moved to Chicago. There, the clubs stayed open really late. I’d play six to seven shows per night, which really solidified my playing.