"JoJo Man" Blues to play 8 countries, January – October, 2023
After playing some 700 South African shows over the last eight years, Doc MacLean has got African dust in his blood. Shifting his heart into the southern hemisphere, the upcoming, mostly solo, JoJo Man Blues Tour brings real deal songs and stories to his largest and most diverse audience yet. For the first leg of the tour, beginning in January 2023, eighty shows are planned across South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana.
Over a performing career which spans nearly half a century, Doc MacLean has appeared at many of the world's most significant folk, blues and roots music festivals, but he is perhaps best known for his relentless touring habits, and for his rejection of a First World music business that would reduce blues to a colourful genre.
In recent years, MacLean has driven over 100 thousand km across southern Africa, taking it for his own. He's now played almost all of its largest festivals, smallest juke joints, coolest theatres, and best regarded presentation stages.
Writing from the dark side of the road, Doc MacLean remains a songster from the delta tradition. A traveler. Gifted as a youth by the grandchildren of slaves, MacLean now sings his own stories and tells his own songs in his own voice. His mostly resophonic, finger style slide guitar pays sonic homage to Patton, House, and Big Joe Williams, while moving forward in a roots based, yet contemporary context.
To MacLean, the Blues is not a genre: it is a condition of the human spirit, a healing music, a journey of the soul, a container of past, present, and future. JoJo Man surfs the space between the dreamlines and the songlines: not practised, not learned: but channeled and told in the moment.
