American Blues Theater
American Blues Theater is the premier American theater producing visceral theatrical works while engaging its audience with local service agencies. American Blues Theater illuminates the American ideas of freedom, equality, and opportunity in the plays it produces and communities it serves.
American Blues is committed to developing the classic plays and musicals of tomorrow. Its new work development consists of a variety of programs – including World and Regional Premieres, the Blue Ink Playwriting Award, Blueprint commissions, and Ripped: the Living Newspaper Festival of new short-plays. More than half of American Blues' mainstage productions are world and Chicago premieres.
History
Founders
American Blues Theater was founded in July 1985 by Edward Blatchford, Rick Cleveland, James Leaming, and William Payne. The company dedicated itself to new and classic American plays. Richard Christiansen of the Chicago Tribune cited American Blues as one of three companies in his editorial "Chicago Theater Forges New Standards of Glory." In August 1993, the company leased a warehouse on Byron and Lincoln. In 38 days, James Leaming led a community-based 90+ volunteer crew to transform the space into an intimate 134-seat theater. From 1994-1997, the Ensemble was lauded with numerous Joseph Jefferson Awards and After Dark Awards.
American Blues
American Blues were an American 1960s Texas-based garage rock band, who played a psychedelic style of blues rock music influenced by the 13th Floor Elevators. They are most notable for including two future members of the band ZZ Top in their ranks, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard. From 1966 to 1968, they played the Dallas-Fort Worth-Houston circuit and headlined in three clubs all called "The Cellar", in Dallas at clubs such as "The Walrus" on Mockingbird Lane, and in Houston at "Love Street Light Circus Feel Good Machine" on Allen's Landing, as late as 1968.
Around 1968 the band (the two Hill brothers and Beard) decided to leave the Dallas–Fort Worth area, relocating to Houston. At this time, however, guitarist Rocky Hill wanted to focus on "straight blues", while his brother Dusty wanted the band to rock more. Rocky left the band, and the remaining two members joined the recently formed ZZ Top.
Rocky Hill continued to tour around Texas, and elsewhere, becoming one of a number of guitarists well-known within the state for their blues guitar prowess, such as Rocky Athis and Charlie Sexton. In this role, his playing in Austin was said to have been an influence on guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan's formative years, as well. He sometimes referred to himself as "The Anti-Clapton", and one writer with the Houston Press called Rocky "perhaps the wildest and scariest – both onstage and off – of all the Texas white-boy blues guitarists."
Podcasts:
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by Sparks The Rescue
American Blues
by: Sparks The RescueAnd to never see your face again
Read the omens or face consequences
That trigger disaster in the blink of an eye
I spy a tidal wave, head for the hills and pray that we survive
Your hands are red, Your lies are white
My tongue is tied
Another classic case of the American blues
Your fiction spread, your twisting lines
Now write it down
Another classic crime and are you wrongfully accused?
I’m throwing coins, my wishes never came
So many coins darling, but who’s to blame
I’d make them all mine in the blink of an eye
She sighs, you’ll be sorry running back to me when karma comes your way
Your hands are red, Your lies are white
My tongue is tied
Another classic case of the American blues
Your fiction spread, your twisting lines
Now write it down
Another classic crime and are you wrongfully accused?
Are we damned or just terrified
to watch this world turn over and die?
Your hands are red, Your lies are white
My tongue is tied
Another classic case of the American blues
Your fiction spread, your twisting lines
Now write it down
Another classic crime and are you wrongfully accused?
I’ve got this, you’ve got this