Welcome to our blog, the Music Maker Signifier, and Happy Fat Tuesday! On this day of cultural celebration, we would like to introduce you to the newest endeavor from Music Maker Relief Foundation. We are approaching our 20th anniversary—twenty years of assisting Roots music pioneers, designing our unique model of support and educating audiences worldwide. As we come to this milestone, we are more committed than ever to helping people Know The Roots. The Music Maker Signifier will be a place of music, amusement and knowledge shared with you by Music Maker staff, friends, fans and musicians.

Twenty years ago an eager and curious Tim Duffy was told it was a waste of time to search the South for authentic Mississippi Blues, Georgia Blues and North Carolina Piedmont Blues because any artist of significance had passed away in the late 1960s. But Tim explored anyway and found that while people die, the music doesn’t. There were musicians keeping these traditions going, but they were being buried alive by poverty. How could the small number of dedicated Blues researchers out there, folks like Bruce Bastin, Kip Lornell, Peter B. Lowery, George Mitchell, Axel Kustner and Bruce Lagule, find these artists, when the musicians had so many obstacles standing in the way of playing outside their home communities? Artists were still out there, living their lives and playing their music, with no thought of sharing their art with the world. Tim and I founded Music Maker to help these elderly, impoverished cultural treasures do just that.

True American Roots music still exists in rural, poor communities all over the South. Music Maker shines a light on these musicians, letting the music live on. Visit with us here at the Music Maker Signifier and see that “the Blues is a spirit that will never die.”

Check out the documentary Toot Blues, which chronicles the inception of Music Maker.