Blues Moments in Time - January 9: Echoes of Struggle, Shadows of the Blues

In this episode of Blues Moments in Time, January 9 becomes less about a single record and more about the world the blues speaks to. We travel to Panama in 1964, where students marching to raise their flag in the U.S.-controlled Canal Zone sparked deadly riots and a national reckoning. Their fight for dignity and sovereignty mirrors the same emotional core that runs through the blues and the American Civil Rights Movement—a demand to be seen, heard, and treated as fully human.

Musically, we drop the needle on 1976, when Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” sat at the top of the UK charts, a snapshot of the moment when blues grooves, tones, and phrasing had seeped so deeply into rock that most listeners no longer heard them as “blues” at all—just the sound of popular music. The episode traces how the genre’s DNA quietly underpins rock, folk, and pop, even when the label disappears.

We also mark the birthdays of Joan Baez, Jimmy Page, and Dave Matthews—three very different artists who each carried the spirit of the blues into new spaces: protest folk, thunderous hard rock, and globally inflected jam-band improvisation. And in the silence of major recorded blues deaths on this date, we sit with what’s missing: the countless early blues voices who lived and died off the record, without obituaries or headstones. January 9 becomes a meditation on how the blues lives on in echoes, influences, and the stories history forgot to write down.

Hosted by: Kelvin Huggins

Presented by: The Blues Hotel Collective

Keep the blues alive.

© 2026 The Blues Hotel Collective.