For reasons unknown to me, my post "Stuck Outside The Forum With The Hendrix Blues Again" attracted more readers than anything else on "Words And Music".
In short, it was a complaint about a Facebook group called The Real Blues Forum refusing to allow discussion about Jimi Hendrix being a blues guitarist.
Well, it's happened again. But this time the guitarist whose name cannot be mentioned is Stevie Ray Vaughan.
The latest trouble started when a hapless member of the forum posted a video of Albert King performing with Vaughan. A small discussion started about the playing styles of the two men, but was cut short by a right-thinking member of the forum pointing out that this discussion transgressed the rules. Something like: old black players ok to talk about, but modern white players (or Hendrix) not ok to talk about.
Someone then asked how on earth this video had even been posted in the first place.
When I responded by asking: "Can blue men play the whites?" - a light-hearted reference to the Bonzo Dog Band's classic enquiry - my contribution was almost immediately moderated, ie removed.
So now I've removed myself from The Real Blues Forum. It's funny that Albert King was able to bring himself to play with the likes of Stevie Ray Vaughan and Rory Gallagher, and that BB King could sing the praises of Eric Clapton and Peter Green, but (predominantly white) blues purists don't seem to even want to talk about them.
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