Al Blake, born as Alan Blake Eliel, shot into the world January 16, 1945 on a marine corps base near Klamath Falls, Oregon. While later growing up during the early 50s in Oklahoma, the Blues began tugging at his heart under the influence of his black nanny Ruby Anderson. She used to pack him over to the other side of the tracks where her small house sat nestled near Oklahoma City. Down the street from Ruby's house was a small general store where a hi-fi, with a large outdoor speaker, loudly played the Deep Southern Blues while people listened and danced there on a daily basis.
Fascinated by this music, Al began collecting all the great Blues recordings he could find. But finally just listening to all this musical magic was not enough and over time he began seeking out these living artists as mentors and with each personal experience of being able to watch their body language as he listened, both his understanding of them and his empathy blazed his own musical fires to higher and higher levels.

Today Al Blake still walks the paths of those early mentors with a near-sacred need to preserve their tradition and avoid selling out to the aberrations of so many modern Blues-makers. His music is slowly evolving to the status of legend. Blake has said, "If the kind of Blues I'm so passionate about playing was a 4-legged mammal, it would be on the top of the endangered species list. It's that rare." Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.