"Figured this might be up your alley...Don't know if you ever heard any of the old Alan Lomax field recordings. If so disregard...If not I figure these recordings might offer some inspiration.

"Negro Prison Blues and Songs

"Original Black Betty and so as not to be a total downer Ram Jam - Black Betty

Ram Jam!!!"

-Nero the Pict

Oh King of Pennsylvania Pictdom, I have oft heard complaints of cultural piracy leevlled at the Rolling Stones, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Clapton, that they stole old negro blues born under the white man’s lash and used it to turn a profit. However, when one considers that white slaves cleared the lands and first tilled, sowed and reaped the fields of miserable toil, and that their British masters [such as William Bligh, who wrote of forcing his slave sailors to dance to music for two hours per day] forced them to dance to the fiddle, pipes and drums [which began when they were kidnapped as boys in Scotland and entertained in the locked barn they were being held in by adult musicians], I see the adoption of negro blues by rockers as a coming back to our Caucasian slave roots and reaquiring the tarditions of our forgotton ancestors, just as European scholars reaquired the works of the Greek philospophers preserved in Muslim lands while Christendom slumbered.