Jim O’Neal, a cofounder of Living Blues magazine and Rooster Blues Records, worked on the committees that launched the Chicago Blues Festival, the King Biscuit Blues Festival, the Sunflower River Blues Festival, the W.C. Handy Blues Awards.(now known as the Blues Music Awards), and the Mississippi Blues Trail. O’Neal has also participated in dozens of film, video and TV projects, and worked as a booking agent, festival organizer, music publisher, freelance writer, photographer, lecturer, tourguide, and coproprietor of the Stackhouse record shop in Clarksdale (1988-1998), in addition to running an ongoing mail order business in rare records. Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on Nov. 25, 1948, O’Neal was raised in Mississippi, Memphis, and Mobile. He remained in Chicago after graduating from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism until he returned to Mississippi in 1986. He and his wife Amy published and edited Living Blues in Chicago for 13 years, until the publication was turned over to the University of Mississippi in 1983, along with a collection which, along with those of B.B. King and folklorist Kenneth Goldstein, became the basis of the world’s first blues archive. O’Neal edited LB for another four years and continues to contribute as a founding editor. After moving to Kansas City in 1998, he launched BluEsoterica Archives & Productions as well as a new label, Stackhouse. “The Voice of the Blues,” a compilation of early Living Blues interviews with Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, and others, edited by O’Neal and Amy van Singel, was published by Routledge in 2001. Since 2006 he and former Living Blues editor Scott Barretta have been researching and writing texts for the Mississippi Blues Trail historical marker project. The marker count had reached 169 by the end of 2012.
