Blues Man

First prize winner at a DreamslayerArtworks contest, November 2012. The topic was "American folklore." As a musician, the first thing I thought of when I saw the title "American Folklore" was the blues man. Blues was created by a bunch of poor black folks—sharecroppers, vagrants, recently freed slaves. And it's been one of the most enduring music forms of the last century. Most of these guys have drifted into obscurity, but we remember the colorful characters like Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Mississippi John Hurt, and Rev. Gary Davis. Some of them have legends about them, like the one about how Robert Johnson traded his soul to the Devil to play guitar. While this picture wasn't meant to represent a particular person, I recall seeing a photograph of Lightning Hopkins smoking a cigarette and talking with his hands somewhere. RuntimeDNA picked this up as their picture of the week not long after I first uploaded it.