00:00 Allison Miner introduces Eleanor Ellis and Jesse Thomas; Jesse was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. Playing at the age of seven; blues on the guitar; electric piano; started to play. He played other people’s pianos around town as he didn’t have one of his own. 04:00 Age of 15 and went to Shreveport, then Texas; Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson; stopped playing blues for a while; He moved to Fort Worth; took music lessons; Joined Big bands; inspired by skills of their saxophone player and wanted his guitar playing to sound like that. He wanted to play the complex solos that he heard in the saxophone. He met a clarinetist who helped him and gave him a book to learn. 08:59 Electric guitar; the sound he was looking for. He could now adjust the volume, hold the note but still could not go up and down the scales like a saxophone; read a jazz book; need to learn the blues in order to learn jazz. 10:22 He plays a short example of saxophone and piano on his guitar. 12:09 songwriting experience and recording history; RCA Victor in 1929 when he was 18 years old; Modern Records and Specialty Records; with Little Richard, The Platters and John Lee Hooker. 14:30 Demonstration – Jesse plays “Turn Your Lights Down Low”. 16:42 He talks about the necessity for an ‘attractive’ title for a blues track. Blues ...is a conversation telling a story, set to music, to be played and sung 19:04 Jesse talks about how he never knew how to write records. He talks about how they would be paid an advance to write and then the records would not be great and not sell. He describes how they did not know how to write properly and gives an example of a naively written song. 20:15 How Blues has changed over the years. 27:28 Jesse performs demonstrations of different styles of music. He plays a short; popular music’ love song. A Latin-beat song (Besame-Mucho tune). A Country and Western song. 32:04 Demonstration. Jesse plays a blues track on guitar with a drum track. 35:57 Interview ends