American Music

via Open Culture

Awesome archival footage of Blues legends Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters, Lonnie Johnson, Sugar Pie DeSanto, Howlin' Wolf, Big Joe Turner, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe performing for a UK audience eager to experience true "American Folk" music. The performances were eventually broadcast on British TV between 1963 and 1966. Legend has it that at the first stop of the tour in Manchester in 1962, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Jimmy Page were all in the audience. Because they wanted to learn from the masters, obviously.

There's something so grainy and textured about listening to old recordings by the likes of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf that it's almost impossible to imagine them being alive in the broadcast TV era. But here you go. They're not in living color but they might as well be. God what I would've done to be there, in that audience, right at that moment.