ABSTRACT
It had seemed like such a good idea. Having grown up in Alabama and Mississippi, I had always loved the Blues. Since taking a job in 1996 at the Shonan Fujisawa Campus of Keio University, Japan’s foremost institution for Internet research, I had been delighted to discover so many Blues artists in my adopted homeland. Tokyo was filled with Blues bars. So it was natural enough, I thought, to propose an experiment: an Internet jam session in real time, linking Blues musicians in the two countries. Because Clarksdale, Mississippi, is the legendary birthplace of the Blues, I decided that this global Blues jam would work best during Clarksdale’s annual Sunflower River Blues and Gospel Festival, an event known to Blues aficionados world-wide.
