Published: Saturday, July 30, 2011 at 3:30 a.m.
The withering Alabama heat isn’t a problem for Christer and Vanja Fridhammar, who flew to the Shoals to attend the W.C. Handy Music Festival.
The couple, from Goteborg, Sweden, are not strangers to the Muscle Shoals area, but this is their first visit to the festival, which celebrates the music of native son William Christopher Handy, the Father of the Blues.
“We love the heat,” said Christer, a retired banker who’s turned his attention to his first love, the blues. He hosts a website that chronicles a vibrant roots music scene in Goteborg, and Vanja photographs local musicians.
“The music is fabulous, and the heat is a bonus,” Vanja said.
So, how did someone from far away Sweden become enamored of a distinctly American music?
“I got into the blues when I heard Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac at a concert in 1968,” Christer said. “It was like a religious experience. It opened doors.”
Fleetwood Mac began as a hardcore blues band in England in the late 1960s, and Green was considered on a par with Eric Clapton as a blues guitarist at the time.
Christer said that was “second-hand” blues, but began to investigate the band’s source material, which led him the early blues masters such as Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson.
Christer and Vanja met years ago in Goteborg through a mutual friend in a local blues band.
“We met because of the blues,” Vanja said.
http://www.timesdaily.com/article/20...-up-atmosphere