Blue Dubh

Blue Dubh are based in Central Scotland. Dirty harmonica, lazy slide and soulful vocals blend together to give a fresh sound to blues classics, while at the same time retaining their original essence to give a truly authentic feel. Blue Dubh personnel are no strangers to the live scene and have graced the stages of many well know venues and blues festivals up and down the country from Orkney to Edinburgh. In their first year Blue Dubh have already appeared at The Dundee Blues Bonanza and the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival.

Blue Dubh are -

Sandy Black - Harmonica/Sax/Vocals

Charles Tibbles - Bass/Vocals

Dubh (pron. doo)  is the gaelic word for black.

So Blue Dubh seems an appropriate name for a Scottish band playing black blues music. But why gaelic? Recent research by Prof. Ruff of Yale University has shown connections between gospel music and the gaelic musical tradition of "lining out". This is a call and response form of worship where a precentor sings the first line of a psalm and the congregation follows.

Black congregations in Alabama still worshipped in gaelic as recently as 1918.

Prof Ruff began his research after being intruiged by stories from jazz legend Dizzie Gillespie who insisted on the connection between Scottish and Black American culture and could remember older relatives talking about how their elders would speak in gaelic.

Prof Willie Ruff (a reknowned bassist and French horn player who played with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington) believes "lining out" evolved into the call-and-response of spirituals and gospel music that, in turn, influenced other American musical styles.

"I can think of no musical tradition that can lend itself to be `blackened' by these Africans as this," said Ruff, who is black. "The basic stuff that would later be spirituals, blues, ragtime, jazz, bebop -- everything else that came later has some of this genetic DNA."

 

More information on the gaelic/black connection can be found at Willie Ruff or at The Scotsman