Mike Shannon

In June 2001, while “La raja de tu falda” was setting Barcelona’s nights alight, chance brought an elegantly turned-out North American bluesman to the city. His name was Mike Shannon, he was known as Dan Electro, and he ended up at his sister’s home in Barcelona after a tour of Europe was cancelled. The effluvia of the blues led him to a jam session at La Boîte, where he was offered a one-month contract. On the last night he met the person who would become his wife, and the rest, as he himself says, is history. And that history tells us that, once integrated into the Barcelona blues scene, he began to spread the idea of creating something that would bring musicians and fans together to give the local scene a push. After numerous and arduous meetings in nightspots, the result was the Societat de Blues de Barcelona. That jam in Sarasota, Florida, where he got hooked on the blues, now lies far away — a music he has played since the late eighties and which led him to collaborate with the greatest names in the genre in the late nineties, to travel the world with his harmonica, and finally to the shores of the Mediterranean, following what he so likes to say: “Trust the blues”.