Fast Links:

Home

Writers: Create Your Own Easy-to-Edit Website

About Sonya

Contact Sonya

Books by AlaskaWriter Members

News & Tips

Member Services:

>>Edit Your Site
(Sign-on page for Alaska WebWriter)

>>Online Help for Editing Your Site
(Detailed information about how to update your AlaskaWriters site — from entering text, to sizing and uploading images.)

“Most musicians never make it on their music, so they have to work day jobs — just like I did.”

— Amy van Singel

Years ago, when Amy van Singel cofounded a magazine to celebrate her favorite music, she never envisioned the venture would bring her recognition at New York City’s Lincoln Center.

Yet that’s where she found herself December 4, 2003, when the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers presented van Singel a special recognition Deems Taylor Award (awarded to both Van Singel and co-author Jim O’Neal) for the book, The Voice of the Blues: Classic Interviews from Living Blues Magazine. The annual awards are given for outstanding print, broadcast and new media coverage of music.

Van Singel and co-author Jim O’Neal were former co-editors and founders of the magazine Living Blues.

Now back in Anchorage, van Singel tells AlaskaWriters Homestead how it all came about.

AWH: Could you tell me a little about founding Living Blues Magazine? Why a magazine, and what was that like?

AVS: This is all involved in my formative teenage years ... After discovering the music and the Jazz Record Mart, I found out about a couple of British blues magazines, Blues Unlimited and Blues World. I started subscribing to Blues Unlimited in high school. They were interesting to read, but often I did not have access to the vinyl or quite understand the discographies. Or the record auctions! It also seemed strange to have to read about American music from a European point of view. Very often, the stories merely detailed information about the artists’ records. I wanted to hear about the MUSIC and the creators of the music, not just statistics.

... It seemed insane to have to learn about the music & musicians from Europe, when they were available at my back door! (I lived in Hinsdale, Ill., a wealthy West Side suburb of Chicago.) I wanted to hear the musicians’ stories in their own words, and get them DUE CREDIT for their musical genius because of / in spite of tremendous adversity.

As a sophomore at Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.), she met Jim O’Neal and they discovered a common interest in what others thought was “strange music.” Amy began broadcasting blues on WNUR, the campus station, and both she and Jim signed up on a notice on the Jazz Record Mart’s wall: It was titled, “Want to Start a Blues Magazine?” The first issue was published in the spring of 1970. Jim & Amy were married before the second issue came out.

AVS: Founding Living Blues really turned out to be about a lot of synergy. Hanging around the JRM helped me meet other Blues fans. Paul Garon (now internationally-known blues writer/collector and blues “philosopher”) had already worked for the boss, Bob Koester (Delmark Records jazz & blues producer and record company owner). Bruce Iglauer (now kingpin of Alligator Records, the largest, or at least most famous, blues indie company in the U.S.) started out as a shipping clerk at the JRM. I met Jim O’Neal on a blind date. We four, plus three others, started LB as sort of a communal group project.

The mag was planned in 1969 (in Chicago), at Bruce’s grubby little one-room apartment in Uptown. The guys who ran the Swedish blues mag Jefferson (yes, Swedish!) crashed at his place and we got to meet them.

This was the last gasp of the hippie era. Alternative publishing was sooooo easy back then, except for the dorky technology. (ALL of the first 57 issues of LB which I help to produce, were pre-PC. Also pre-word processing technology. We never even had typesetting equipment with “memory.” If the typesetting got stuck in the processor — and believe me, it did — one had to start completely over from scratch.

I was married to Jim O’Neal from 1970 through 1987, and we lived and produced Living Blues from various basement locations in Chicago through 1983, when Ole Miss (University of Mississippi) took over. I didn’t know I was giving away my place at Living Blues at that time. I only found out after contracts were signed that husbands and wives were not allowed to work in the same department at Ole Miss.

I moved to Mississippi in Sept. 1986, after (Jim O’Neal) had been down there for several months, editing LB. Today, LB continues to be published by Ole Miss.

AWH: Can you share a moment or two from your most memorable interviews?

AVS: Still my biggest thrill: I got a phone call from Homesick James (Williamson — no relation to Elmore James, though Homesick played electric slide modeled after Elmore), and Homesick said he had someone there I should talk to. And, all of a sudden, I was talking on the phone to harmonica player Snooky Pryor!!!

Who the hey is Snooky, you ask?

He was one of the FOUNDING FATHERS of the electric Chicago blues harp ... One of his early tunes, “Boogie,” predates Little Walter’s monster hit, ”Juke.” Snooks was a very seminal, obscure player, who had quit the music biz in disgust for lack of recognition and had disappeared ten years earlier. I knew of his music through a British bootleg LP. So I had a hand in jump-starting Snooky’s new music career, got him his first U.S. record deal (through blues promoter Al Smith), got him some trips to Europe, etc. I am very happy & proud to say that he is an 80-something superstar in the blues world today. He is one of only a very select few to grace Living Blues’ front cover more than once. That’s how highly he is regarded.

In addition to THAT story, I have been so very privileged to know these great musicians, help out a few more careers, and become very close longtime friends with many of them. It was great when Blues on the Green brought up several of my old friends, including KoKo Taylor, Eddie Shaw and Otis Rush, among others.

AWH: How did the book come about, and what did it mean for you to be honored at Lincoln Center?

AVS: I had always felt that the old Living Blues interviews should be put into book form. I mean ALL of them. This book only has 12 interviews. We had published 57, and I have no earthly idea how many interviews have still gone unpublished. Jim O’Neal and I started trying to find a publisher around 1993. So it took nine years for the music climate to change (mature?) before Routledge became interested.

Jim O’Neal gets the nod for the bulk of the reprints/reworking of what appears in “The Voice of the Blues.” He cut me in 50 percent because of all the work I did on the “front end’ of the book, ie., typesetting, writing, transcribing interviews, photography, darkroom work, creating ads, etc., from before we handed Living Blues magazine off to Ole Miss. Not to mention that I just about always had to hold down a “day job.”

How’d it feel to get a national award and pick it up at the Lincoln Center??? Wow! I was astounded at the outset to receive a call from ASCAP, because I’ve never written a song in my life. I was very touched that ASCAP even acknowledged that the blues exist, and that the book obviously touched somebody (I have yet to find out who actually nominated the book, and that it won the Special Recognition Award in the “Pop Books” category was a total surprise to me. The people honored for the book included Jim O’Neal, myself, and the publishing entity. I was the only one to show up for the ceremony. And I almost missed it due to jet leg … I had lain down in the grubby West Side YMCA for a nap, woke up at 6:30 p.m., ceremonies began at 7 ... I had to snatch on my clothes, stumble through a developing blizzard for three blocks to get to the Lincoln Center. Whew!

I was ushered to a staging spot down in the right side of the audience, then escorted in front of the front row of seats to await my podium acceptance experience. A photo of the book’s cover was projected behind me as I walked across the stage, and I was announced: “And all the way from Alaska!” I did have to make a little speech, crediting Jim O’Neal first, then Routledge, and then all the musicians, producers, etc., down to the groupies that had made the book happen. Then five or six photographers had to take my pix, holding the award plaque. Flash, FLASH!!! It was a VERY BIG DEAL for me to get some recognition, because Jim (who worked for the magazine full-time) had gotten most of it all along. “Day job” is a musician’s term. Most musicians never make it on their music, so they have to work day jobs — just like I did.

AWH: Please tell a little about your relationship to blues music. Why the blues?

AVS: I don’t really know, except that I was raised in a pretty damn dysfunctional family (long before that term was coined), and it just resonated in my head. I was fascinated with exploring a totally foreign culture, right in the United States, and of course the whole civil rights thing was going on while I was growing up. I intensely disliked what I considered rip-off musicians getting fame and credit for what was truly America’s own music, and I wanted to get them proper recognition.

— Compiled by Sonya Senkowsky