Robert B. Jones
Reported by Erik Smith
Web produced by Rachel L. Miller

Robert Jones is on the air Saturday mornings.

His name is Robert B. Jones. Teacher, preacher, historian and storyteller are just some of his calling cards. He's also known as Robert Jones, the blues man, Detroit's personal custodian of an African-American treasure.

If you listen to public radio on Saturday mornings, you hear him. Perhaps he is explaining the history of an obscure recording of a song born in the backwash of the Mississippi Delta, for this is Robert Jones, the historian.

"I've got a song that I wrote, and it says, 'I didn't pick the blues, the blues picked me,'" Robert says. "It is peculiar in its own in the world of music. It's African-American, and that in the truest sense of both worlds, because if you go to Africa, you can't find the blues. And the blues exists in that interaction between African music and American music."

Robert plays a song for a group of schoolchildren.

Maybe if you happen into a public school and hear an acoustic guitar and the voices of children, you will not only hear, but see Robert Jones, the teacher and the historian, keeping the original music of generations long past alive again for today's generations.

"Now, I take that song and I eliminate the music and I only say the verses one time instead of twice," he says to a group of students. "I can get that whole song in, but it will sound like this."

The blues song he was just singing is now transformed into something a little more familiar to auditorium of students.

"What does that sound like?" he asks once he is finished.

"Rap," the children all respond immediately.

"So you start to think about it, this music that we think is so different that we listen to," Robert explains. "It's still related to, tied to the music that our fathers, grandfathers and great grandmothers created."

Robert talks about blues and American music to the students.

For Robert Jones, the road to the classroom, the microphone, the stage and the pulpit actually began with an old pawn shop guitar and a love of the music of his ancestors ringing in his heart. He had no idea back then where those six strings were going to take him.

"Yeah, this old instrument, this old 1933 national steel guitar, we've been a lot of places together, and it's really been a blessing," he says, holding his old guitar. "It's given me the ability to meet people I wouldn't have met, go places that I didn't think I'd see."

Robert and his old guitar.

The music, the lyrics, the blues has taken Robert on a good many journeys around the nation. He conducts seminars in colleges, his "Blues for the Schools" program has fascinated thousands of kids, and his incomparable musicianship continues to captivate adult audiences wherever he goes.

"In spite of being sometimes a little hard to categorize, a little flat, I found it's been really a blessing to say, well, 'I'm not quite sure why I am the mix that I am," Robert says. "But it must be what God intended, and so when you do that, you can't go wrong."

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