The Ndustry Interviews Blues and Soul Vocalist and Guitarist, Gitlo Lee!

Tune-In to the Live show this week as the Ladies of the Ndustry, Akia Uwanda and Nicole Lester, interviews a Blues Great, Gitlo Lee!

Like all good blues-experience stories, the next ingredient involves the special combination of luck and divine intervention that leads to a close brush with early fame: a notorious and established bluesman, Sonny Boy Williamson, just happened to be playing a New Year's Eve gig in Darien and needed a guitar player when word spread of a 13-year old prodigy. There are two Sonny Boy Williamsons. This one was of King Biscuit radio fame, was younger than the first and was sometimes called Sonny Boy Williamson #2. He knocked on the Lee's door to inquire after the young man he'd heard so much about. The New Year's Eve gig was a success that impressed the seasoned and elderly performer so much that he invited the 13-year old Gitlo to hit the road with him. It may sound young, but according to Gitlo, "I was already a grown dude at 10, 11 years old." Under Williamson's tutelage, Howlin' Wolfe became a household blues name. So you can imagine the disappointment the young man must have felt when Gitlo's mother said, "absolutely not." "I feel like I really missed a big one," he said. "But I love doing it anyway. I'm excited about playing tonight as I was about playing with Sonny Boy."

Among musicians, the term "chitlin circuit" refers to gigs that old-school, hard-knocks, unpolished blues performers play in. And for years, Gitlo has fit the chitlin-circuit bill, which can be summed up as carrying blues players good enough to be famous, but too real to be transmogrified into market fodder by the music industry. So Gitlo remains about as grassroots as the blues can get. Listen via mobile at 718-766-4964 or online.