Big Joe Duskin is a blues and boogie-woogie singer and pianist from Birmingham, Alabama who has lived in since the 1930s. A veteran of and Northern Kentucky bars and nightspots, he has served as opening act for Muddy Waters, Albert King, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and others. He has recorded one LP, Cincinnati Stomp (Arhoolie 1080) and has performed in Canada, California, and Europe as well. This interview represents the ideas of one bluesman, period. I'm not sure that representative blues performers exist (or even what they are), but if they do, I'm sure their opinions on their art and life would vary as much as artists in any other field. We might come up with some kind of consensus if we asked similar questions of a cross-section of blues artists representative of the breadth of the discipline. When Joe Duskin sat down at my kitchen table on a winter afternoon several months ago, I was intent on discovering his opinions, as a moderately successful, but not highly influential, bluesman, on a number of topics from his own view of his art to his view of other people's views and interpretations of it. Sometimes question and answer barely connect; sometimes the discussion did not always go where I thought it would; often I thought hard about the tone of Joe's responses; his almost continual response to questions with stories forced me to consider the interview as a kind of performance. Of course, any interview is a performance to some degree, but Joe is very intent on entertaining his listeners, whatever it is he's doing. Feminists may not be particularly entertained at times, nor will those disturbed by casual references to violence. But those things are part of Joe's life, or at least part of his stories about his life. And the blues, after all, are stories about life.