Living Blues Magazine, founded by Bruce Iglauer, Jim O’Neal, Amy van Singel, Paul Garon, et al.

Living Blues magazine, founded by Bruce Iglauer, Jim O’Neal, Amy van Singel, Paul Garon, Diane Allmen, Andre Souffront and Tim Zorn. Chicago, 1970.

Living Blues, America’s first blues magazine, was created to fill a stateside void in blues coverage at a time when blues periodicals had already been launched in Belgium, England, Sweden, France and Holland. Founded by a group of young blues enthusiasts in Chicago, LBdiffered from previous, more historically-oriented blues literature by focusing more on current activity on the blues scene — hence the title Living Blues — and by giving a primary voice to the blues artists themselves, spoken in their own words in the often lengthy interviews that became a prominent feature of the magazine. LB, now in its fifth decade of chronicling blues in the African American tradition, has been published since 1983 by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, first under the editorship of O’Neal, followed by Peter Lee, David Nelson, Scott Barretta and Brett Bonner.