Dan Bowden

"What draws students to my private lesson studio are the instrumental labs that I develop, which deal with acoustic blues, slide guitar, and bottleneck guitar. An important goal of mine has been to expand on what would be the typical blues education—trying to round out the blues students we have playing modern electric blues style by imparting some historical perspective along with traditional blues skills that are still viable in today's music when you look at Eric Clapton, Derek Trucks, Taj Mahal, or people like Keb' Mo'."

"I think there's always a core of students interested in the blues, just as there's always going to be a core blues market for concerts, recordings, and so on. That is stable. What you do see is that it can grow at certain periods fairly hugely, starting with the British guitarists in the 1960s who changed the face of rock music forever through their passion for American blues. Stevie Ray Vaughan brought back another resurgence, and now our former student John Mayer, who's very invested in blues, is generating more awareness."

"When I left the college as a student, I played a lot of different styles. I had already been a professional musician since leaving high school. I played commercial gigs along with roots music. I was even in a reggae band and an original rock band. At the time I became a faculty member, I also got very interested in documenting early blues and jazz, and I became a transcriber and ended up doing over a dozen books of blues and jazz greats for Mel Bay Publications. My first book was on Mance Lipscomb, who I saw at the 1970 Ann Arbor Blues Festival. I was a teenager, working there selling programs. It was great that I got to meet, at a very formative age, a lot of these people that continue to inspire me. That was a godsend."