American Indian Blood, Black American Music, and Finding Our People

On Jack Dappa Blues Radio & TV, Lamont Jack Pearley walks two trails at once: the Blues Trail and the Bloodline Trail.Beginning with the image and memory of his great-great-great grandmother Susan Nash, this broadcast explores how Black family history, Indigenous memory, oral tradition, land, and the Blues are deeply connected. Through the lens of Prison Planet, Blues Ecology, and the Blues Narrative, this episode asks: what did our people know about themselves before the records named us wrong?We’ll discuss Blues legends and roots artists whose stories open conversations around Indigenous ancestry, Native land memory, Black Southern history, and American roots music — including Charley Patton, Howlin’ Wolf, Lowell Fulson, Scrapper Blackwell, Richie Havens, Jimi Hendrix, Pura Fé, Martha Redbone, Aaron Neville, and more.We’ll also carefully examine artists such as Muddy Waters, Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and R.L. Burnside, not to claim what cannot yet be proven, but to explore the Indigenous land, Black labor, plantation memory, migration, and survival ecology that shaped the music.This episode is also an introduction to tracing your own family’s Indigenous memory through what Lamont calls The Three Trails Method: the Paper Trail, the People’s Trail, and the Sound Trail.This is genealogy.This is cultural preservation.This is family legacy.This is the Blues Narrative returning our attention to our own story.Follow the records. Listen to the elders. Preserve the story.