Blues Moments in Time - February 18th: From Germantown Protest to ‘What’d I Say’
February 18th pulls together moral resistance, civil rights sacrifice, and some of the most important turning points in modern Black music. We start in 1688 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, where a small group of Quakers draft the first formal protest against slavery in the English colonies—a quiet but radical act that lights the torch of moral resistance at the heart of the blues. Nearly three centuries later, in 1965, Alabama activist Jimmie Lee Jackson is shot while protecting his family during a protest in Marion; his death becomes the spark for the Selma to Montgomery marches and helps push the blues toward a harder, electrified edge that matches the violence of the times.
Musically, February 18th is a Big Bang date. In 1959, Ray Charles records “What’d I Say,” tearing down the wall between the church and the dance hall and effectively inventing soul music by fusing gospel fervor with blues grit. Eleven years later, the Allman Brothers Band cut “Statesboro Blues,” electrifying a 1920s country blues tune for the rock generation and proving the blues is a living language that can cross time, race, and genre.
We also mark the births of two foundational voices: Lonnie Johnson, who essentially invents the modern guitar solo and shows the instrument can sing like a human voice, and Irma Thomas, the “Soul Queen of New Orleans,” whose records have carried her city’s joy and sorrow for decades. The day also holds the passing of Snooks Eaglin in 2009—the blind New Orleans “human jukebox” whose limitless repertoire and funky, bluesy guitar web embodied the idea that this music is lived, not just played.
February 18th stands as a reminder that the blues is a running report from the front lines—rooted in protest, reshaped by innovation, and carried forward by artists who turn suffering into soul.Hosted by: Kelvin Huggins
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