The Ghost of Henry Sloan

PROJECT BACKSTORY

The Ghost of Henry Sloan

The Ghost of Henry Sloan is a mythological journey through the inception and early spread of the blues, told not as history, but as a series of unanswered questions.

Rather than asking what the blues sounded like right after it was given a name, this project asks something more elusive:

What were the songs that changed everything — the ones no one recorded, but everyone felt?

The album begins at the often-cited point of origin: a late-night train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, where W.C. Handy reportedly heard a lone guitarist playing a sound so striking it would later inspire the term the blues. What was that song? What did it feel like in the dark, with steel wheels cooling and nothing but distance ahead?

From there, the record follows a hypothetical path of influence across the Southeast. It imagines the sound moving into juke joints near Dockery Farms — asking what might have happened if Henry Sloan and Charley Patton played together, and how that collision could have shaped the raw power of Delta blues. It asks what kind of song could have pulled a young Robert Johnson deeper into the music, and what he might have played the night he fully committed himself to it.

The album doesn’t attempt to answer these questions definitively — because they can’t be answered. Instead, it treats them as moments of transmission: sparks passed from player to player, room to room, generation to generation. Each track represents a speculative link in that chain — not a reenactment, but a meditation on influence.

This journey continues through temptation, virtuosity, movement, boogie, electricity, and consequence, following how the blues adapted as it traveled — not just geographically, but spiritually. The story acknowledges the costs along the way: exploitation, ownership, faith tested, and the price of being heard.

The “ghost” of Henry Sloan serves as a framing presence — not as an originator to be credited, but as a witness to what followed. He doesn’t haunt the album. He observes it. The final message isn’t resolution or explanation, but continuity:

These songs may never be known.
But their echoes shaped everything that came after.

The Ghost of Henry Sloan isn’t an attempt to document the blues.
It’s an attempt to walk the path it might have taken — and listen carefully along the way.