Utah Blues Associates and Musician Federation

02/06/2026

Happy Birthday Ogden, God Bless 25th Street Forver Forever

12/17/2025

On 25th Street, before the neon cleaned up and the stories got sanded smooth, there was the Porters & Waiters Club.

It was a refuge and a headquarters. A place built by railroad porters and service workers who carried the weight of the line by day and came together at night for music, conversation, cards, and community. This was Ogden’s Black social heart during the rail era — a space of dignity and self-determination in a town that moved on schedules and hierarchies.

Jazz, blues, laughter, and hard-earned wisdom filled the room. Deals were made. Stories were swapped. Musicians passed through. What happened inside mattered, even if it didn’t always make the papers.

Ogden’s 25th Street is famous for its grit and glamour, but the Porters & Waiters Club represents something deeper: mutual aid, cultural survival, and joy created in the margins. It reminds us that history doesn’t just live in headlines — it lives in rooms where people gathered to take care of one another.

If you want to understand Ogden, don’t just look at the tracks and the trains. Listen for the music that rose up between shifts. That sound still echoes.

During the 1940's and 50's, Ogden's 25th Street Porters and Waiters club was a stopping point for the era's top Jazz musicians. The club was run by AnnaBelle...

11/19/2025

Historical consulting, serious research, and memorializing seminal blues artists at rest in rural cemeteries since 1989

11/01/2025

Franz Nicolay’s new book, “Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music,” details the lives of working musicians, especially those far from the spotlight: background vocalists hired for uncredited recording sessions, rhythm guitarists playing on freelance contracts. These musicians, Nicolay argues, were the original freelancers making do. Now life is different for working musicians: there's probably never been a better time to share a song you’ve made, and yet it’s harder than ever to get paid for it. Read Hsu's review of the book, which collects stories about how musicians who have played alongside the likes of David Bowie or Madonna simply get by: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/vgaHMj

10/23/2025

10/02/2025

The Blues-man or Blues-woman, far from being a simple entertainer, provides a similar social and cultural role to the shaman or preacher. Rather than being an intermediary between the world of man and God (or in Jungian parlance, the ego and Self), he or she often fulfils the role of psychopomp, guiding the audience through a descent into the body and the realm of the lived experience of human suffering. Paradoxically, it’s this chthonic descent into the shadow that creates the possibility of an enantiodromia - the psycho-spiritual emergence of its opposite, a transcendence.