CONTEMPORARY ORAL-HISTORY & DOCUMENTARY PODCAST ARCHIVE
About Talking Blues
Talking Blues explores the Blues through the people who express it. Rather than simply retelling the history of the music, we look beyond the songs, recordings, and familiar biographies to examine the conditions that shaped each person, the influence those conditions had upon them, and the Blues expression that emerged.
Through original long-form conversations, biography, and historical context, we explore that relationship: the condition, its influence on the person, and the Blues expression that ultimately emerges.
Where did this person’s Blues come from?
THE TALKING BLUES FRAMEWORK
Blues Condition → Blues Influence → Blues Expression
Every Blues expression begins somewhere.
Blues Condition - The circumstances or conditions that exist: hardship, displacement, love, loss, oppression, work, faith, geography, community, mortality, joy, etc.
Blues Influence - How those conditions act upon and are experienced by the individual. Two people can encounter the same condition and be influenced differently.
Blues Expression - What the individual subsequently does with it: voice, lyric, instrument, performance, storytelling, movement, visual art—or potentially an entire way of communicating experience.
Talking Blues - Follows that path in both directions: from the conditions and influences that helped shape an artist to the expression we ultimately hear—and from the expression back toward the life behind it.
One Conversation. Many Connections.
Each conversation explores one person’s Blues influences, condition, and expression. Preserved through audio, video, transcripts, and documentary images, those individual stories become part of a growing archive.
Across conversations, connections emerge—between people, places, eras, experiences, and ideas—revealing patterns that no single story can show.
Talking Blues does not seek one definition of the Blues. It preserves many voices and explores the connections between them.
What Our Guests Are Saying
MARK HUNT
“Matt's a great interviewer who made me feel comfortable talking about myself, and that I might even be interesting.”
Mark Hunt
Musician · Songwriter · Guitar Builder
BOBMARGOLIN
“Thanks Matt, for setting me up with good questions. ‘Don’t Start Me Talkin’, I’ll Tell Everything I Know…’”
Bob Margolin
Blues Guitarist · Former Muddy Waters Band Member
BRUCE CONFORTH
“I've done a lot of interviews on the Johnson book. You're a good interviewer.”
Bruce Conforth
Blues Historian · Robert Johnson Biographer
FEATURED IN
Amplifying the Voices of Canadian Blues
A feature on Matt Cooper, Talking Blues, and the importance of documenting the artists and stories behind the music.
BEHIND THE MICROPHONE
A Periodic, Somewhat Persistent Blues Disorder
maTT cOOPER
Some people experience music more intensely than others.
Matt Cooper apparently decided to make this everyone else's problem.
A ’70s wild child → thoroughly corrupted by the rock ’n’ roll of the ’80s, Matt was weaned on the British Invasion—when British musicians plugged American Blues into Marshall stacks and sent it roaring back across the Atlantic. Led Zeppelin became less a musical preference than a religion, and hair was considered an architectural project. Eventually, curiosity demanded a look behind the curtain. Follow Zeppelin back far enough and there they were: the Blues players who supplied the DNA.
Matt learned guitar and bass—well, sort of—partly to understand and partly to approximate whatever it was in the music that was having such an effect on him. He still plays bass. No one has yet confused him with Willie Dixon.
Hearing and playing the music eventually wasn’t enough. Matt had to know where it came from. What happened to the people who made it—and to their descendants? Who taught them? What shaped them? And why could something born in somebody else’s life reach across decades and rearrange the furniture in his own?
What followed was something of a rabbit-hole disorder. One song led to an artist; the artist led to a life; the life led to places, people, hardship, joy, culture and circumstance—and eventually back to the expression heard in the music.
Somewhere along the way, he also spent a career in rock radio and broadcast journalism, where he discovered that being professionally authorized to ask impertinent questions was considerably more useful than having a proper job. Then he got a proper job. But that’s another story.
Talking Blues is what happened when the rabbit-hole disorder collided with a broadcaster's licence to ask questions: a lifelong fascination with the Blues meeting the compulsion to ask, “Yeah, but where did that come from?”
There are historians here. Musicians. Writers. Scholars. Bluesmen and blueswomen. People who know considerably more than Matt does—which is precisely why he talks to them. The object isn’t to demonstrate what the host knows. It’s to find out what they know, where it came from, and what it might tell us about the person behind the music.
Because eventually the trail keeps leading back to the same place: the condition, its influence on the person, and the expression that emerged.
That’s the rabbit hole.
Welcome to Talking Blues.
KEEP THE CONVERSATION GOING
Contact Talking Blues
Guest suggestions, stories, archive corrections, media inquiries—or something you think we should know.