Predicador Ramírez

A man of ready speech and flowing lyrics, Paco Ramírez came into the world on an ill-fated 28 December, amid a series of catastrophic snowfalls, as he likes to tell it. He took up the guitar under the influence of Rory Gallagher, Deep Purple and other rock bands in which he later discovered the ferment of the blues, going on to become one of the pioneers of the genre in the early eighties. Affable, creative, professional and versatile, he has carried his guitar across every stage in the country, from local festivities to clubs and blues festivals, both with his own line-ups and in historic bands of Spanish music or with international bluesmen. His wit and ironic sense of humour have made him one of the leading figures cultivating the difficult and risky subgenre of blues in Spanish, even though what seduces him about the blues is precisely its quality as a universal language and its purity: “It possesses that which only very pure styles have: even if they don’t know it, people can tell that it’s authentic, and as a rule they like it.” After a whole life devoted to music, this inexhaustible survivor finds in the blues a lifeline to cling to: “Over the years, in many genres the instrumentalist grows old, but with the blues the opposite happens: the years give you experience and it’s a style in which you can apply it and discover that this is your finest moment.”