Blues Legend Rory Block to Play the Valatie Community Theatre, Saturday, April 15 

Seminal Blues guitarist Robert Johnson’s grandson Greg Johnson has said of Rory Block’s music, “It’s as if my grandfather is here all over again.” As a child of the ‘60s daughter of a Greenwich Village sandal maker, she rubbed shoulders with Dylan and other Village artists who became legacies. 

She has gone on to span the great divide between pop and traditional blues as arguably the most powerful blues guitarist performing today on her Power Women of The Blues series. She told me in 2017, “This is that spiritual thing, that lifesaving thing that happened to me when I was a little teenage girl without a root in the soil and without a center to hold me down to earth.” 

She not only respects the blues tradition, but she is also reverent in presenting the heritage of blues as American culture. The intensity and perfection in her performances debunk the idea that women might ever be considered the weaker sex. 

 “When I was 14, along comes this guitar player named Stefan Grossman, and he hands me a record called Really the Country Blues, followed by this fabulous two-hour-long, reel-to-reel tapes of all the rediscovered blues LPs. For an entire year, I slept with headphones listening to these tapes of unbelievably rediscovered music, listening through the night, being washed in the healing and spiritual nature of the music. That’s what saved my life, and it still saves my life. It still saves my life.” 

On her latest album, Ain’t Nobody Worried, Rory offers an impassioned take on 11 songs, many of which are popular music treasures that have long since been ensconced in the mass population’s collective consciousness, including Gladys Knight and The Pips’ “Midnight Train to Georgia,” Mary Wells’ “My Guy,” Carol King’s “You’ve Got A Friend,” Martha Vandella’s “Dancing in The Streets,” and Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” 

Rory does “cover” – a term that hardly does justice to her interpretations – several blues standards on Ain’t Nobody Worried. However, these numbers are outside her usual choices in her Power Women of The Blues series. Her take on Elizabeth Cotton’s “Freight Train” is particularly effective. Her love of Etta James’s “I’d Rather Go Blind” inspired her to create this album. Her interpretation here is the most like the original of any songs she covers. Etta and Rory are sisters of another mother. 

Upon the release of Ain’t Nobody Worried, Rory said, “Everybody has the ability to tap into that supernatural energy that’s around us. I really feel like that’s where all creativity is from. When things take over, become timeless, and you’re doing things you love to do, in your case, you’re interviewing, and you’re writing, whatever you’re doing, you’re no longer in a time zone. You’re just getting energy. And that’s what happens to me when I’m recording or performing – that same exact thing. I don’t know where the energy comes from. It’s outside me, and it comes into me. That’s how it works.” 

Rory Block spans the great divide between pop and traditional blues and, in the process, sets the bar height for blues as America’s contribution to culture.