Bob Koester was extremely helpful to me in Chicago when I was working on The Devil’s Music (1976), a five-part documentary series on the history of the blues produced for BBC One by Maddalena Fagandini. I greatly admired Bob’s work as the owner of Delmark Records, with a reputation for integrity.
He picked me up from my hotel, took me to a blues club for a drink, and shared his knowledge and contacts without constraint, advising me cheerfully: “Don’t get into blues if you want to make a pile of money.” He struck me as a hard-bitten cynic with few illusions on one side, and yet also a heart-warming idealist and indestructible romantic on the other.
He took me to the famous Delmark Record Mart and down into the basement, where he had 35mm and 16mm film projectors, and a wondrous collection of old films featuring blues and jazz performers. There was a superb clip of Mamie Smith, one of the earliest people to sing a blues song on a record (in 1920), and an even rarer one of Ida Cox, another artist in the so-called Classic Blues style.
Bob did not hassle me to use any of his artists, but did play me He’s Your Man, But He Comes to See Me Sometimes by Edith Wilson, another blues pioneer, recorded in 1921. By the 1970s her style was long out of date, yet Bob had recorded her with the piano player Little Brother Montgomery, and needless to say, we filmed Edith and Little Brother performing together.
