"Well, I first started going to Europe in the late '70s"
About this Quote
There’s a whole origin story tucked inside that plainspoken “Well.” Luther Allison isn’t offering a glamorous travelogue; he’s signaling a pivot, almost a resignation, to the reality that for many Black American blues musicians, Europe wasn’t a vacation. It was a workaround.
“The late ’70s” matters. By then, electric blues had been cannibalized by rock’s mainstream boom, disco was swallowing radio, and the U.S. industry had a habit of treating the people who invented the sound as heritage acts at best, disposable at worst. When Allison says he “started going,” it reads like a professional decision dressed up as casual memory: you go where the audiences are, where the clubs will book you, where the critics will take you seriously, where a grown man can make a living playing the music he actually plays.
The subtext is a familiar but still bitterly contemporary dynamic: American culture exports Black innovation, then requires its originators to seek validation abroad before it circles back and calls them “legendary.” Europe, in blues lore, becomes both refuge and mirror, a place that listens hard precisely because it’s at a distance from the U.S.’s racial and commercial sorting mechanisms.
Even the lack of detail does work. No named cities, no triumphal tone - just the start date. That sparseness suggests repetition: many trips, many stages, a long stretch of being understood somewhere else. It’s the quiet preface to a larger story about recognition, economics, and what it costs to keep your art intact.
“The late ’70s” matters. By then, electric blues had been cannibalized by rock’s mainstream boom, disco was swallowing radio, and the U.S. industry had a habit of treating the people who invented the sound as heritage acts at best, disposable at worst. When Allison says he “started going,” it reads like a professional decision dressed up as casual memory: you go where the audiences are, where the clubs will book you, where the critics will take you seriously, where a grown man can make a living playing the music he actually plays.
The subtext is a familiar but still bitterly contemporary dynamic: American culture exports Black innovation, then requires its originators to seek validation abroad before it circles back and calls them “legendary.” Europe, in blues lore, becomes both refuge and mirror, a place that listens hard precisely because it’s at a distance from the U.S.’s racial and commercial sorting mechanisms.
Even the lack of detail does work. No named cities, no triumphal tone - just the start date. That sparseness suggests repetition: many trips, many stages, a long stretch of being understood somewhere else. It’s the quiet preface to a larger story about recognition, economics, and what it costs to keep your art intact.
Quote Details
| Topic | Travel |
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