Blues Blast Magazine features Doug MacLeod on the cover of their newest issue, and has a wonderful lengthy interview. We’ll excerpt some of the great interview, but you can read the full thing on TheBluesBlast.com!
“Singer, song-writer and guitarist Doug MacLeod is one engaging individual. He’s the kind of guy whose easy-going approach and dis-arming smile make it impossible not to find him likable. Stories roll off his tongue easier and more gracefully than a river flows down stream. MacLeod is also blessed with a razor-sharp wit – listen to any of his songs for further proof of that – and he’s also very adept at thinking quickly on his feet…
“There’s not many fans of the blues that have not had some form of contact with MacLeod, either by listening to one of his 20 albums, by reading the charming and amusing stories he wrote for Blues Revue magazine for a decade, or by gazing at his portrait that hangs inside the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
MacLeod’s latest studio effort, Brand New Eyes (Reference Recordings/Fresh), garnered him a pair of Blues Music Award nominations this year, one for Acoustic Artist of the Year and one for Best Acoustic Album.
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“Well, I realized that the blues are a great medium for singer-songwriters. And that’s what I am – a singer-songwriter. But the blues is the thing I do. When you think about it, Son House was a singer-songwriter. Blind Boy Fuller was a singer-songwriter. Big Bill Broonzy, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Robert Johnson, those guys were all singer-songwriters. They were folk musicians. And I just like to think I’m kind of carrying on that tradition.”
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…“And I was singing all these songs at that time about picking cotton and all this stuff. And this man told me, ‘Never write or sing about what you don’t know about. If you ain’t lived it, you got no business singing it.’ And I said to him, ‘Well, Mr. Banks, I don’t know … what am I going to write about?’ And he looked at me with that one eye he had and said, ‘Have you ever been lonely? Have you ever needed a woman or some money for that little room where you stay down there?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ And he said, ‘That’s the blues, too. Write about that.’ I thank my lucky stars that I was fortunate enough to have met Mr. Ernest Banks back when I did.”
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“I couldn’t get any girls. I couldn’t get any girls with the bass, so I switched to the guitar,” he laughed. “So I started playing acoustic guitar and when I joined the Navy, I started playing in the coffee houses and so on.”
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“All it takes is just a casual glance over some of MacLeod’s columns to understand that he not only has a way with putting together words that rhyme and setting them to life with music, but that he is also a highly-entertaining author of prose on a page, as well.
In addition to his journalistic efforts and his singing, songwriting and guitar playing, plus, the appearances that he does in various workshops and the occasional instructional DVD that he puts out, MacLeod never seems to hit the idle switch for very long.
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“In my mind, this is not a music about suffering. It’s not a music about partying all the time. It’s a music about overcoming,” MacLeod said. “Not everybody gets a good shake in this world. Most of us don’t. And this music talks about how you overcome that. When you’re in the bad times – know that you can overcome. And then when those bad times are gone, this music helps you celebrate that, too.” — Interviewer Terry Mullins of Blues Blast Magazine
Read the wonderful, full interview and story on The Blues Blast Magazine website!