Exerpt taken from the Fort Worth Weekly on Thursday, March 4th, 2010. Author CAROLINE COLLIER & PHOTOS BY ANNA ROUTH - original article

The musicians at Mambo’s Tapas Cantina were recently doing what their predecessors have been doing for ages: showing off licks, telling life stories set to music, and improvising within the unspoken rules of the discipline called the blues.

As they are every Monday, bassist Cadillac Johnson, drummer Gonzalo “Gonzy” Trevino, and guitarist Hash Brown were at the downtown bar and restaurant, holding a steady shuffle and pumping out those once-in-a-lifetime guitar solos. Guitarist Drue Webber, just shy of his 30th birthday, was the youngest muso in the place.

As Webber was putting away his guitar afterward, a woman walked up to him and said she heard the music from the street. “It was like she’d been in the desert without water,” he said. “She wanted to know where the good blues had gone. She needed a hospital visit to take care of her
need for the blues.”

A lot of other blues fans in town probably feel the same way. The Fort Worth scene these days isn’t actually a desert, despite the recent news that there would be no more regular shows at J&J Blues Bar, one of the oldest and most popular blues clubs in not just Fort Worth but all of North Texas. But, like many across the country, Fort Worth’s blues scene has dried up considerably in recent years. From the late 1940s through the ’90s, it was a truly special thing. A handful of internationally acclaimed players called Fort Worth home. T-Bone Walker, Cornell Dupree, Ray Sharpe, and several other artists and their backing
bands spawned a distinct sound: The Fort Worth Shuffle, a lazy, Texas-styled beat found here and only here. (Think: the ching-ching-ching-bop-budda-bing of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Texas Flood” but lazier.) And many internationally known players such as Bobby “Blue” Bland, Jimmy Reed, and Howlin’ Wolf regularly played here.

More from this article here:

The Blues Got The Blues - The Ft. Worth Weekly