"I prefer the mythologist to the historian."
— Jean Cocteau

"Earlier this year I contracted what is often referred to as the blues. It was an innocent gesture that got me: a Lead Belly record was loaned to me by a friend. I put it on as background music and eventually felt immobile. I turned the music up and was transported to another world. That was it.

Eventually I became obsessed. Research was conducted. Books were read. My mind could not tolerate any other music. I became enamored with my idealized portrait of the blues men's lives. They were ramblers wandering through a harsh world, a landscape cruel and unforgiving and a society exploitative and evil. Their personas were manufactured through rumor and the call-and-response form of the times. But most of these men were forgotten. They are now nothing more than an ethereal sound buried in the grooves of a record. They are lost in the vaults of history.

The drawings I've made are an ode to the forgotten gamblers of the blues. Their lives were amazingly interesting and deserve a second look no matter what is dug up along the way." — Lane H.