Before there was a vaccination, the only Covid-19 medicine I had for the isolation of the lockdown periods was making music with my oldest friend, Daniel Rapport. We have been friends since we were born, formed a band in high school, and now have an acoustic blues duo, The Blue Tide. We have long drawn our inspiration from the Mississippi Delta blues, with Daniel playing acoustic and slide guitar and me on harmonica. As Covid-19took off, with the death toll rising and all of us sheltering in place, I was able to connect (remotely at first, then later in person) and overcome the loneliness by writing lyrics about the pandemic and pairing them with the guitar licks Daniel was writing. During this time we experienced the uprising for Black lives of 2020 and raging climate change-induced wildfires that filled the air with thick plumes of smoke–and so we began writing songs about the overlapping pandemics of Covid-19, racism, and the climate crisis.
As I continued to work on our Plague Blues album over the summer, my dad Gerald Lenoir made a stunning discovery: our family was enslaved on the same plantation in Morgantown, Mississippi as the family of the legendary blues artist, J.B. Lenoir. After years of investigating our genealogy, he finally found out the specific
— source commondreams.org | Jesse Hagopian | Jun 20, 2022