blog post My kinda blues: George Stroumboulopoulos

George Stroumboulopoulos, beyond being a host on television and radio, is a deeply dedicated and omnivorous music fan. In our My Kinda Blues series, we ask people how they got turned on to the blues in the first place. It was natural we ask Strombo. He tells us his story.

Several times in my life I’ve driven down to Memphis, and then even further south in Mississippi, and on to Helena, Ark., looking for Lead Belly’s home. I’ve driven into Greenville and knocked on the door of T-Model Ford. He was kind enough to share a little music. Once I went down to Oxford, Miss., and convinced R.L. Burnside to have a conversation so I could introduce him to the audience at MuchMusic when old blues guys weren’t on MuchMusic. I remember trying to get Honeyboy Edwards to do an interview with us, for the TV show, which he agreed to do at like 1:30 in the morning, when he wasn’t trying to pick up 30-year-old girls. Honeyboy was in his ’90s at this time! Those were wonderful times.

So the blues is a huge part of my life, and it’s been the focal point of some of the things that I’ll always remember.

There was a year of big change in my life, a time back in the 2000s, and I needed to kinda reset. I was sitting in my place in Los Angeles thinking about making my way back to Toronto for work for a little bit. So I hopped on my motorcycle and I headed east. The idea was to get to Mississippi for August 16th. That’s my birthday, but it’s also the day that Robert Johnson died. So much is made of the myth of Robert and the death of Robert. I can appreciate all of that, but really and truly to me it is that handful of songs that really got me going, as it comes to the blues. As much as I like all the different sides and sounds of blues, I’m really all about the Delta blues.

There’s a big difference for me between the blues out of Chicago and the blues out of the Delta. In Chicago it’s all about the good-man-feelin’-bad. So the Delta is also the place where I think it’s not just the good-man-feelin’-bad but sometimes also the bad-man-feelin’-bad and often it’s the bad-man-feelin’-scared, and for whatever reason that was set in my brain early on and that’s the kinda music I love.

So I rode my motorcycle out and tried to get to Mississippi to try to find Robert Johnson’s grave, on the day that he died, on the day that I was born. And I know Robert Johnson has three graves, one set up by the record company where he definitely isn’t buried, but there’s a chance that he’s at one of the other two graves, or maybe at some unmarked grave in a ditch, somewhere near a crossroads.

I found one grave, just because I’d been there 10 years earlier. By asking locals on their way into church, and people at gas stations, I went looking to find this other grave of Robert Johnson’s. I was getting really old school directions, like “go down that road until you don’t see blacktop, when you don’t see blacktop make a right, there’ll be some gravel, when you’ll see a tree, it’s under there.” This went on all afternoon but by the end of the day, my birthday and his death day, I was able to stand on all three of Robert Johnson’s marked graves. I remember it was a quiet and beautiful way for a blues fan to celebrate a birthday.

That’s one of the things that blues has done for me. There’s so many more, but thank you for letting me share this story.



Related Links:
The devil and Robert Johnson
My kinda blues: Andrew Galloway
Moreland and Arbuckle

With files from Dan Cherwoniak.