Blues Before Sunrise is the blues heritage showcase. Each Saturday night, this Chicago-based, nationally syndicated public radio program explores, preserves, and popularizes the various eras and genre of blues heritage. The focus of the program is in the first fifty years of recorded blues - from Mamie Smith's Crazy Blues, the very first Blues record, recorded in August of 1920, to approximately 1970. This is the period that defined the Blues as America's true root music - the basis for the root of American popular music including gospel, jazz, rhythm & blues, soul, and rock & roll.

Imagine walking through the rooms that house the record collection at the Smithsonian Institution, the walls lined from floor to ceiling with shelves of blues records, blues from every era and stylistic school ever known. Blues Before Sunrise is the program that pulls the records off the shelf and plays them for you, profiling the seminal figures that shaped this music. Blues Before Sunrise is not just another record program, it is an arts preservation project.

Blues Before Sunrise is the most highly regarded blues radio program in America. The program is currently celebrating over a quarter of a century on the air - an extraordinary record for any public radio program. Its success is based in part on the fact that the program specializes in playing records you won't hear anywhere else. On Blues Before Sunrise, every week is Black History Month!

And it promises to do wicked things to your sleep schedule!

Airs: 12 a.m. to 5 a.m. Sunday on KSTX 89.1 FM
Website: www.bluesbeforesunrise.com