Message from the BLUES-L Founder (seriously!)

Thu Oct 25 19:51:57 EDT 2007

You guys have me beat by a long ways.  I think I joined first in 95 and 
left during a particularly nasty flame war.  I remember Ocky Milkman 
well.  I came back a couple of years later and managed to see the return 
of Rick Edwards.

Leonard Watkins wrote:
> I think I joined the first day or so it seems - sure was fun
> LW
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Unger" <rbu2@earthlink.net>
> To: <BLUES-L@LISTS.NETSPACE.ORG>
> Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2007 6:04 PM
> Subject: Re: Message from the BLUES-L Founder (seriously!)
>
>
>> Welcome back, Steve.  I joined Blues-l in early '93 - I think Jacob 
>> had just taken over when I joined.
>> To say Blues-L has been a roller coaster ride over the years would be 
>> an understatement!  I did go no-mail once for a few months .. about a 
>> year or so ago - otherwise I've been reading the posts all these 14 
>> years and have gained a wealth of knowledge about blues and met  
>> many, many fantastic people on this list that I will never forget.  I 
>> remember the first blues-l "convention".  I think about 10 of us met 
>> up at the Chicago Blues Fest in '95.  We've also had blues-l tapes 
>> and CD's, t-shirts, fundraisers....  I never really thought about it, 
>> but damn, we did a lot over the years on Blues-L.
>>
>> Bob Unger
>> rbu2@earthlink.net
>>
>>
>>
>> Steve Greer wrote:
>>> Hi! My name is Steve Greer and I founded the BLUES-L when I was in 
>>> college
>>> at Grove City College in Western Pennsylvania in the fall of 1992. 
>>> E-mail
>>> and the internet was new to me then and I started the list out of my 
>>> new
>>> college e-mail account, receiving all messages and editing them 
>>> together
>>> into a daily digest, with an index and adding my commentary and notes.
>>>
>>> I haven't been involved in the blues-l much since then, but now I'm 
>>> back on
>>> here and glad to see it's still going strong.
>>>
>>> I've been deeply into blues since high school in the mid-1980's, and 
>>> still
>>> am. Since I guess it's been over 15 years that I've been recording and
>>> filming live blues performances, as much for history's sake as 
>>> anything. I
>>> currently live in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.
>>>
>>> At the present I have a blues radio show on 91.1 FM, WRVU at Vanderbilt
>>> University here in Nashville. It's on the air from 8-10pm every Sunday
>>> night. You can stream the show over the internet at www.wrvu.org, 
>>> and listen
>>> to the previous week's show by going to: 
>>> http://wrvu.org/spoonful.ram. All
>>> of my past playlists (all 95 of them!) are available here:
>>> http://129.59.202.44/playlistarchive/playlist_detail.php?pop=find_list&data=Spoonful 
>>>
>>>
>>> Recently I was cleaning out old boxes from storage and came across 
>>> printouts
>>> of probably all of the original blues digests, I'm not sure but I 
>>> think I
>>> may have compiled and edited 100+ issues of the digest before I had 
>>> to hand
>>> the list off to a successor. First it went to Valerie Polichar at 
>>> University
>>> of California in San Diego in February of 1993. Soon after that, in 
>>> early
>>> March of 1993 my list was combined with a blues list that Jacob 
>>> Haller had
>>> recently started at Brown University. Until I handed it over to 
>>> Valerie, I
>>> had no idea that it could be done automatically! Lucky for me 
>>> because Grove
>>> City College was on to us, that is those of us who had figured out 
>>> how to
>>> read newsgroups and connect our "internal" college e-mail outside of 
>>> our
>>> intranet, and were considering charging us *per e-mail*, for both 
>>> incoming
>>> and outgoing messages in our mailboxes. Needless to say, this was a 
>>> great
>>> cause of concern for me considering that I was then receiving sometimes
>>> hundreds of messages per day. That's when I found out about Jacob's 
>>> list at
>>> Brown and we decided to merge both lists into the Blues-L in the 
>>> Spring of
>>> 1993, soon before I graduated.
>>>
>>> So, I just wanted to say hello and revisit the past a bit. I have to 
>>> say
>>> that I'm very proud to have been one of the seeds of what is today's
>>> Blues-L, and I'm glad it's still going strong.
>>>
>>> I think I have all of my old digests. It looks like the server 
>>> archives go
>>> back to January 1999. The original daily digest that I have would be 
>>> Fall
>>> 1992 trough Spring 1993. I'd be happy to arrange to add these to the
>>> archives, if someone could help me figure out the process.
>>>
>>> Thanks!
>>> --Steve Greer
>>>
>>> P.S.--I just found a list of subscribers from 2/11/1993, there were 99
>>> subscribers at that time. Are there any of the late 1992/early 1993 
>>> original
>>> subscribers left?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Also, I found this in the archives:
>>>
>>> HISTORY OF THE LIST IN ITS VARIOUS INCARNATIONS
>>>
>>>     The original Blues Mailing List was started by Steve Greer out 
>>> of his
>>>     personal e-mail account at Grove City College.  All entries were 
>>> sent
>>>     to him and he would personally compile a digest every day and 
>>> send it
>>>     out.  This was in late October of 1992.
>>>
>>>     Around the February of 1993, Steve's e-mail access took a nosedive.
>>>     Fortunately, at the time Valerie Polichar at University of 
>>> California
>>>     in San Diego offered to take over control of the list, and a more
>>>     efficient, (and less time intensive for the operator) form of 
>>> the list
>>>     started up around March 1, 1993.
>>>
>>>     Then around April 15, 1993, the current version of BLUES-L was
>>>     started.  Jake Haller was the instigator and he was not aware of 
>>> the
>>>     ucsd list.  A message was posted on the ucsd, and since the 
>>> Brown list
>>>     seemed to have more traffic, everyone moved over to the new list.
>>>     Jake lost e-mail with his graduation over the summer of 1993, 
>>> and the
>>>     list has been run unofficially by nameless people at Brown.
>>>
>>> Blues-L web site: http://www.netspace.org/~blues-l/
>>> Archives & web interface: 
>>> http://lists.netspace.org/archives/blues-l.html
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>>>
>>>
>>
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>>
>
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-- 
It's never too late to do something your parents didn't want you to do.
When that time comes Barrelhouse Solly will be there for you.  He cares.

Tunes:  http://www.myspace.com/barrelhousesolly
Fractious felines:  http://ratemykitten.com/my/?gallery=willie_mctell

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