Now raising
Floyd's School of Blues
A bold, original effort to capture the true essence of the blues, and give it away.
Every lick, every bend, every bit of feel that came up out of the Mississippi Delta, learned straight from the people who still play it the real way, and passed on in a way it never has been before, to the entire world.
The fundraiser
Go Blues
$150,000
Goal
$0
raised of $150,000
- $100,000The trip happens.
- $150,000A documentary on the trip.
Floyd's School of Blues is a project of SwaCo LLC, a for-profit company. Gifts are voluntary, not tax-deductible, and help fund Go Blues and the school; they are gifts under the Terms, not purchases, and don't guarantee any particular outcome.
Open now
The Blues Encyclopedia
The school starts here. Meet the people who made the blues, from Charley Patton and Son House to Muddy Waters and Big Mama Thornton. Find out where the legend of the crossroads really came from, and follow a 3D map of how the blues runs through Elvis, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Nirvana.
Why the blues, and why now
Rock and roll, R&B, soul, funk, hip-hop and country all run back through the Delta. Not nearly enough people know how much of the music they love started there.
It is a beautiful, true, deeply soulful art form, and it deserves better than to fall into the abyss of history and be forgotten.
The people who learned it hand to hand, porch to juke joint, are the last living link to the ones who made it. Every year there are fewer of them, and what they know was never written down. It lives in their hands. That's why this can't wait: it has to be captured now, while it's still being played the way it was meant to be.
Something new
For thousands of years, knowledge was passed down by word of mouth. Then by drawings. Then by the written word. Each one changed who could learn, and how much survived.
This is an attempt at the next one: a brand new medium, made from the blues itself, that anyone in the world can benefit from.
When someone picks up a guitar fifty years from now and wants to learn the blues the real way, this is meant to be where it starts.
April – May 2027
Go Blues: a month in the Delta
One month in an RV, from New Orleans up through the Mississippi Delta to Memphis, with a purpose-built guitar recording studio on board. The goal: record as many real blues players as possible, pay every one of them for their time, and film the whole thing for a documentary.
- New Orleans, and the French Quarter Festival
- Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where Lead Belly was first recorded in 1933
- Lettsworth, Louisiana, Buddy Guy's birthplace
- Hazlehurst, where Robert Johnson was born
- Clarksdale, and the Juke Joint Festival
- The heart of the Delta: Dockery Farms, Greenwood, Bentonia's Blue Front Cafe, Leland, Indianola
- Memphis, and the Blues Music Awards
Every player gets heard.
Getting Buddy Guy's attention
Buddy Guy should be the face of the blues for future generations, and the champion of this cause. When people want to learn blues guitar fifty years from now, and here's hoping like hell they still do, he's the one they should think of.
The bridge between the Delta and the future.
Born in Louisiana, he carried that sound up to Chicago, stood next to Muddy Waters, and lit the fuse for Hendrix, Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Nobody alive connects where the blues came from to where it went the way he does. Every gift and every share of this page is a chance for it to reach him.
What success looks like
Success means creating something that has never existed before: something that captures enough of the true essence of the blues to teach anyone in the world how to play it.
And then giving it away. Free, to everyone in the world, through Floyd's School of Blues.