John Long

John Long's uncanny ability to sound like a prewar country blues player -- even as he plays original blues pieces he wrote himself or with his older brother Claude Long -- makes his music sound both like a facsimile of the 1920s and early-'30s blues 78s he so treasures while somehow simultaneously sounding refreshingly modern, maybe because nobody plays this kind of throwback blues anymore, at least not with the care and precision that Long brings to it. Long was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1950, and grew up listening to his mother's jazz and R&B 78s, and the scratchy stur...