Ronnie Baker Brooks joins KGNU’s Sam Fuqua to discuss his new album Blues In My DNA and reflect on his upbringing as the son of blues legend Lonnie Brooks. He also shares lessons his father taught him, such as the importance of work ethic and writing original music and talks about balancing tradition with modernity in his music. (Interview date: 2/7/2025)
Sam Fuqua: Ronnie joins us now by phone. Hey, good evening.
Ronnie Baker Brooks: Good evening, Sam. Thanks for having me.
Sam Fuqua: Oh, sure. Thanks for checking in. The new record is called Blues In My DNA and I know that’s not just a catchy title for you, that’s a fact. You’re the son of Lonnie Brooks.
Ronnie Baker Brooks: That’s right.
Sam Fuqua: And I was reading, this is interesting, you and your brother Wayne, who’s also a blues musician, your dad had you guys backing him up when you were kids. Is that right?
Ronnie Baker Brooks: That’s right, yeah. When we were kids, man, he would have a reel tape recorder on. I’ll be playing the bass lines on the guitar and my brother Wayne would be playing some boxes with some spoons. And he recorded some of that stuff, man, we were just having fun around the house.
Sam Fuqua: I will testify to the fact that your dad was a great live performer. I lived in St. Paul in the eighties, and he used to come up from Chicago regularly. A lot of enjoyable music for me, seeing and hearing him. May he rest in peace. What the main thing he imparted to you as a musician about the work.
Ronnie Baker Brooks: Exactly. Putting the work in, work ethic. Do your homework and study, okay. If it’s someone you like, find out who they like. And dig deeper, and those are the kind of things he taught me. Who’s gonna write the next, I got my mojo working on the next Sweet Home Chicago Song for our generation. So he always instilled in me to write my own material ’cause once you start writing your own material, you develop your own style. So that’s what I’ve been doing since day one.
Sam Fuqua: What’s your approach to the material in terms of honoring the tradition, but keeping it modern? How do you balance that?
Ronnie Baker Brooks: What I do is try to keep it authentic from what I remember or learned, and then I try to bring something new to it to keep it fresh too, but having that authentic thing and then keeping it fresh is the bridge, for me, where I can relate to the blues generation before me. And then hopefully the ones that’s beyond, the next generation.
Sam Fuqua: How has the audience for blues music changed or has it changed since maybe since your dad’s time and over your many years as a performer?
Ronnie Baker Brooks: It’s changed. I remember when I was playing with my father, I played with him for about 13 years in his band .I started out as a roadie, actually even longer than that if you count the roadie years. But when dad was out there, we were playing a lot more colleges. So then the students grow up with you, they grow with you, they follow you from after college. And we don’t do that as much anymore. We rarely do a college gig, so that’s the big difference, is touching the younger generation with the music. Trying to find a way to touch them.
Sam Fuqua: So any college students listening, if you got program budgets, maybe some blues may put some blues in there. And actually that’s, I gotta tell you, man that’s where I first heard your dad at my college in St. Paul in the 1980s.
Ronnie Baker Brooks: There you go. And that’s proof that it works. I’ve played colleges and it was kids that never heard of me before. And once they heard the show, it was like, wow, why haven’t we heard of you? Because they have never been presented with this type of music, at least, nowadays. And hopefully we can break that, and get back to the young people where then they can grow with us. My friends that lived there, Big Head Todd & the Monsters, they did that, they grew up with their audience from college.
Sam Fuqua: True, yeah. And people still turn out to see him to this day.
Ronnie Baker Brooks: That’s right.
Sam Fuqua: Now you haven’t made a record in a while. And what I’ve read is that the economics of recording and selling albums has also changed, that the road is where musicians make their living. Is that the case for you?
Ronnie Baker Brooks: That’s the case. Times have changed. I got an album called Time to Change. It’s changing because first of all, you can make a record and someone can get an account with some kind of streaming service and get everything you recorded and don’t have to pay for it. Now, if you love music, of course you wanna go get it, if you can get it for free. But the true fans always are the ones that come to the show and support the artists. Buy a t-shirt, buy a CD or album, vinyl is coming back now. And buy some kind of merchandise to help us keep going because it definitely has changed. You don’t make the money like they used to on records.
Sam Fuqua: And we’re gonna let you go Ronnie Baker Brooks, but we look forward to hearing you and seeing you play live at the Oriental Theater in Denver. It’s on March 16th and we’re gonna play the title cut from blues. I think we got the title cut queued up. Blues In My DNA, the new record. Yeah, that’s on the alligator label. Is that right?
Ronnie Baker Brooks: That’s on Alligator Records. That’s right. My first record on alligator.
Sam Fuqua: Story de Blues Label outta Chicago. Congratulations.
Ronnie Baker Brooks: Thank you and thanks for having me on the show, and I’m looking forward to coming back to Denver to play these new songs for you guys. Come on out. Gyour tickets now.
Sam Fuqua: Yeah, Ronnie Baker Brooks, take care.
Ronnie Baker Brooks: Thank you.
