Jerry Ricks

"Philadelphia" Jerry Ricks has taken the art of blues guitar to new levels with his two groundbreaking releases for the Rooster Blues label. Raised in the City of Brotherly Love, Ricks has been splitting his time between Philadelphia and parts north during summer and Mississippi during the winter in recent years. Ricks got his master's degree in acoustic blues by hanging out with the likes of Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, and other 1960s blues revival folk-blues musicians when they came to coffeehouses and small bars in Philadelphia. These were artists who were both great names and great personalities: Son House, Jesse Fuller, Libba Cotten, Lightnin' Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, and others who were around for the 1960s folk and blues revival. In his capacity as booking manager for the Second Fret Coffee House in Philadelphia from 1960 to 1966, he had the chance to learn and practice "hangout-ology" with all the above-mentioned bluesmen and Cotten and other blueswomen. Ricks was born May 22, 1940, in Philadelphia. He began playing guitar around Philadelphia area coffeehouses in the late '50s. "I played trumpet as a child and then switched over to the guitar because I used to watch people playing guitar in the streets," Ricks recalled in a late '90s interview. Lonnie Johnson and a few other classic bluesmen showed Ricks his first few blues chords while he was learning to play guitar. After traveling with Buddy Guy's band to East Africa in 1969 on behalf of the U.S. State Department, he caught the travel bug. He did some field research in Arkansas in 1970 for the Smithsonian Institution, working under Ralph Rinzler, and then departed for Europe. Unlike other bluesmen who came up in a less progressive era, Ricks didn't leave the U.S. because he found the racial...