Album Notes

I've been playing blues since 1955, when I stumbled across a piece of Boogie Woogie sheet music in the original Sam Ash music store in Brooklyn, where I grew up. A few years later I discovered the connection to guitar blues, learned that it was all folk music. . . and jazz. I've been lucky enough to know such great musicians as Rev. Gary Davis, Dave Van Ronk, and Brownie McGhee. I shouldn't leave out contemporaries such as the wonderful keyboard and guitar player David B. Cohen, and Jorma Kaukonen, who lives and teaches in my former neck of the woods in southeast Ohio. I just realized that I've been playing the music I love for almost 50 years! And, two days ago I became a grandpa for the first time!

Here's what critics said about recent album, Blues Makes Me Happy:

Good, sturdy country blues. . . (and) a superior boogie-woogie pianist.
Reviewer: Blues Revue
It's always great to hear good, sturdy country blues. BOB FOX tips his hat to genre heroes like Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Willie McTell, and Brownie McGhee (and that's only his guitarist side) on BLUES MAKES ME HAPPY. Fox is a superior boogie-woogie pianist, too, as he demonstrates on the stomping title cut and the more ruminative, "We'll Be Together Again." Also good are takes on McTell's "Statesboro Blues" and the traditional "Death Letter Blues." --BLUES REVUE, February/March 2003


Bobs arresting skills as both interpreter and creator are second to none.
Reviewer: Sing Out! Magazine
BLUES MAKES ME HAPPY features nearly seventy minutes of stripped-down, traditional acoustic blues/folk from Ohio-based Bob Fox (a regular at Cleveland's Barking Spider Tavern). Bob's arresting skills as both interpreter and creator in these idioms are second to none. Influenced by Dave Van Ronk and Reverend Gary Davis in his New York City youth, Fox not only plays a mean elemental, boogie-based piano (the title tune and autobiographical "Bob's West Coast Blues") and six and twelve-string guitar, but has a relaxed exploratory vocal approach that draws the listener in. Fox is also a marvelous arranger, even rendering chestnuts like "John Henry," "Going Down Slow" and "Dupree Blues" fresh sounding. Exhilaratingly personalized covers of songs by Big Bill Broonzy, Furry Lewis, Pete Seeger, Son House (the rapt lamentation "Death Letter Blues") and Blind Willie McTell are also on-target. --GvonT, Sing Out! Vol. 46 #4 Winter 2003