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Posted: 2019-05-12 03:58:12

When your father was a musical theatre and folk singer, your uncle one of jazz's most famous pianists (John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet), and you grow up in New York during the 1960s folk boom, perhaps the cards have already fallen. Perhaps a career in music was inevitable. Eric Bibb​ thinks it was.

Not only was the singer/guitarist/songwriter surrounded by music, he was surrounded by real-life musicians ranging from Pete Seeger​ to Paul Robeson​. His parents fostered his early obsession, taking him to concerts and classical guitar lessons, and meanwhile he immersed himself in the family's diverse record collection, soon zeroing in on what moved him most.

Eric Bibb plays more than the blues.

Eric Bibb plays more than the blues.

Bibb​, speaking while touring the UK, describes his childhood as an environment in which "music was like oxygen". As a teenager he took his cardboard-cased guitar to Greenwich Village on Sundays to "observe and listen and be nurtured by all of this wonderful music. So with going to my dad's rehearsals and recording sessions, my daily life was a whirlwind of musical activity. It was just a total submersion."

The music that snared him most was "American folk music in all of its glorious forms, particularly African American folk music traditions: spirituals, work songs, blues, of course; but everything from Lead Belly to Woody Guthrie, Odetta​, Josh White, Big Bill Broonzy​, Reverend Gary Davis, the great Son House – all of those people were musicians who I had early exposure to and even had a chance to meet quite a few of them. Jazz and classical music were a big part of my musical diet as a listener, but as a player I was really enthralled by rootsy folk music."

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