Bman's Blues Report

"The first time I got the blues, I mean really got the blues, was in 1956. A friend and I got caught breaking into parking meters. I was eleven - he was twelve. Off we went to the juvenile center. The counselors in the center were young Afro-Americans in their twenties and they loved their music, like young dudes do. In '56 their music was Elmore James, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Jimmy Reed. I fell in love with the music and it's been a part of my life since then. As I've gotten older I've tried to concentrate more on playing the Blues than living them." After teaching himself to play guitar, Ron met the late Yank_Rachell, partner of Sleepy John Estes. Yank trained Ron on the finer points of Delta Blues, and they became life-long friends in the process. The actor Peter Coyote helped Ron get his first gig in San Francisco at a neighborhood coffee shop. It wasn't long before Ron put together the Hacksaws and was tearing it up ...

Ron Hacker was born January 25, 1945 in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was brought up without a real family as his dad died when he was four years old and his mother rejected him and his brother, thus church women, aunts and uncles had to take care. All of this only helped to turn Ron into a mean-ass little kid, as he says himself. Bad luck? Well, at least it helped him to find the blues when he - only eleven years old - was sent to the juvenile center for breaking into parking meters. There he got in touch with the blues which wasn't played in his white neighborhood. When Ron moved to the Bay Area for the first time in the 60s with his brother, he did drugs too. When he heard Elmore James stuff in one of the dealer's houses he wanted to play the blues like Elmore and that's when he bought his first guitar for five dollars. Being white and playing acoustic slide doesn't make you a blues musician exactly, so it was Ron's lifetime luck - once he returned to Indianapolis in...

"The first time I got the blues, I mean really got the blues, was in 1956. A friend and I got caught breaking into parking meters. I was eleven - he was twelve. Off we went to the juvenile center. The counselors in the center were young Afro-Americans in their twenties and they loved their music, like young dudes do. In '56 their music was Elmore James, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Jimmy Reed. I fell in love with the music and it's been a part of my life since then. As I've gotten older I've tried to concentrate more on playing the Blues than living them." After teaching himself to play guitar, Ron met the late Yank_Rachell, partner of Sleepy John Estes. Yank trained Ron on the finer points of Delta Blues, and they became life-long friends in the process. The actor Peter Coyote helped Ron get his first gig in San Francisco at a neighborhood coffee shop. It wasn't long before Ron put together the Hacksaws and was tearing it up ...