Got my newsletter in the mail today from the D.C. Blues Society. I’ve been a member since at least 1994 and can remember when this society was flush with volunteers and excitement. Like so many other things involving the blues these days, that’s now gone.

I opened the newsletter and I couldn’t help but notice that half of the titles in the masthead for society officials were without names. There was an announcement that the society was ending its monthly acoustic blues jam at Ellington’s on Eighth because the bar was closing. The electric jam continues at the inconvenient-for-almost-everyone Chick Hall’s in Bladensburg, but I went to that a few months back and it had no energy at all.

I think the end is coming for this society, just like the blues is fading into a small niche musical form like, say, Dixieland. It’s sad, but time moves on. You either move with it or you die in place, and the blues hasn’t been moving forward for some time now.