Dr. Rob Bowman, associate professor of music at Toronto’s York University, is an accomplished blues educator lauded for his scholarship as well as for his support of Toronto’s blues music community and his involvement in Canada’s prestigious Juno Awards. A six-time Grammy nominee, Dr. Bowman received the 1996 Best Album Notes Grammy® for his 47,000-word monograph in the 10-CD box set The Complete Stax/Volt Soul Singles, Vol. 3: 1972-1975. In 1998, he won the prestigious ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thompson Award for his book Soulsville U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records, which was inducted into The Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame in 2013. Dr. Bowman has written liner notes for more than 88 blues releases, has been published in distinguished academic journals, and has produced compilations by Isaac Hayes, Carla Thomas, Lou Reed, Otis Redding, and Booker T. & the MG’s. Besides teaching the blues in university classrooms, as he has since 1978, he also currently mentors and manages the award-winning Toronto blues band Samantha Martin & Delta Sugar.
