Blues Legends Unplugged: A Journey Through Time, Tradition, and Transformation

This event is offered in partnership with the Oxford Blues Festival. This is a free event, open to the public.

Mechanic turned bluesman.

Little Willie Farmer has lived his entire life on his family farm in Duck Hill, Mississippi. He was besotted with the blues by his early teens. He started with an acoustic guitar, but he picked cotton and saved enough money to buy an electric instrument.

He learned about blues and R&B mostly through listening to a powerful station out of Nashville, Tennessee. “John R of WLAC, that’s how I listened to Lightnin’ Hopkins...Howlin’ Wolf,” Willie says. “I learned Lightin’ pretty good, and then I went to B.B. I can play all the up-to-date stuff now—B.B., Little Milton—but I like the old stuff, that’s the real blues. The blues they’re singing today, that ain’t blues to me. It just doesn’t have the feel.”

Willie Farmer will talk about his life in the Duck Hill community and his development as a blues performer.