In this episode of Blues Moments in Time, January 26 becomes a powerful meeting point of invasion, survival, protest, and sound. From Invasion Day/Survival Day and the 1938 Day of Mourning in Australia to the U.S. Civil Rights echoes inside the blues, we explore how music and resistance share the same emotional core—truth-telling, resilience, and identity reclamation.

We then trace how that core travels through time and genre: into Eddie Van Halen’s blues-soaked rock guitar, Prince’s funk-and-soul alchemy, and Billie Eilish’s stark, confessional pop. Along the way, we spotlight Alexis Korner and the global spread of the blues as a foundational language beneath modern music.

January 26 isn’t just a date on the calendar—it’s a reminder that every groove holds a memory, and every note carries the weight of history, survival, and the ongoing fight to be heard.Hosted by: Kelvin Huggins

Presented by: The Blues Hotel Collective

Listen Tomorrow for: Another Blues Moment in Time

Keep the blues alive.

© 2025 The Blues Hotel Collective.

In this episode of Blues Moments in Time, January 25 becomes a date where machines, empires, and human voices all collide around the blues. We start in 1920 with the premiere of Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R., the work that gave the world the word “robot” and announced a new, mechanical age. While factories roared and the idea of replaceable workers took hold, blues musicians were out there doing the opposite—putting names, fears, hopes, and everyday truths back into a world that was starting to feel cold and automated. The blues became the human counterweight to a century speeding up.

We zoom out further to 1554 and the founding of São Paulo, a reminder that long before the first 12‑bar progression, colonial power and forced migration were setting the stage for the African diaspora. Those global shifts—ports, plantations, and new cities—created the conditions in which the blues would eventually emerge in the American South as a distinct, defiant art form: a way for displaced people to claim identity and voice inside someone else’s system.

January 25 is also a birthday roll call for two giants who show the range of what the blues can be. Blind Willie Johnson, born in 1897, carved out the sound of gospel blues with his searing slide guitar and apocalyptic vocals—records from the late 1920s that still feel like they’re coming straight out of the earth. And Etta James, born in 1938, carried that same emotional fire into soul, gospel, and pop, turning every song into a lived confession and dragging the blues into mid‑ and late‑20th‑century radio, stages, and soundtracks.

There are no marquee blues deaths tied to January 25, which makes it feel less like a day of endings and more like a day of beginnings and reflections—a moment to think about the countless known and unknown artists who gave this music its shape. January 25 reminds us that the blues has always sat at the crossroads of history and humanity: forged in colonial shadows, sung over industrial noise, and carried forward by voices that refuse to sound mechanical, no matter how fast the world turns.

Hosted by: Kelvin Huggins

Presented by: The Blues Hotel Collective

Keep the blues alive.

© 2026 The Blues Hotel Collective.

On this episode of Blues Moments in Time, we drop the needle on January 24—a date that quietly sits at the crossroads of blues, country, empire, and pop culture. We trace how Hank Williams Sr.’s 1949 release of “Lovesick Blues” carried blues phrasing and emotional storytelling straight into the heart of mainstream country, blurring genre lines and revealing just how deep the blues runs in American music.

From there, we jump to the birth of John Belushi, whose work with The Blues Brothers helped ignite a late-20th-century blues revival, using film, television, and live performance to reintroduce legends to a new generation. Finally, we zoom out to 1901 and the death of Queen Victoria, exploring how the end of the Victorian era and shifting colonial structures shaped the conditions of the African diaspora—and, ultimately, the world that birthed the blues as a voice of resilience and identity.

This is January 24: not a single headline moment, but an echo of legacy—where every guitar bend and soulful lyric carries the weight of history forward.

Hosted by: Kelvin Huggins

Presented by: The Blues Hotel Collective

Keep the blues alive.

© 2026 The Blues Hotel Collective.