Ancient Web: Alan White Built a Twenty-Year Blues Archive

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Earlyblues.com is the kind of website that becomes a historical archive simply by staying interested in the same music for long enough.

Visit Alan White's Earlyblues.com

Founder Alan White's homepage says the site had been running for twenty-two years when, in November 2022, illness forced him to stop updating the original. Rather than remove it, he left it online as a reference collection. The site points to a newer sister project, Earlyblues.org, for continuing research into blues history.

The old page still advertises a remarkable body of material: thousands of photographs, artist interviews, essays, concert reviews, historical articles, travelogues, books, and festival records. Those totals are the site's own reported figures, but the visibly long indexes make the project's scale plain.

The posters and the conversations survive together

The artist and band index gives visitors a route into interviews, photographs, and other entries about musicians both famous and less widely documented. Another section preserves past UK and European blues festival coverage—who played, what the events looked like, and how the touring community connected over time.

Among the musicians named in the interview listings are Steve Cropper, Walter Trout, Ruby Turner, Ian Siegal, and Alvin Youngblood Hart. The site also contains material on British blues, gospel traditions, and musical influences that extend well beyond standard introductory histories.

White's interests are visible everywhere. He credits contributors, maintains a giant network of categories, and includes an old-fashioned 'treasure trove' of links to sections that no longer fit tidy navigation. A polished modern redesign might hide those older routes. Earlyblues leaves readers free to wander.

White won a UK Blues Award for unsung contribution in 2020, according to the site's homepage, and the site reproduces a 2014 commendation by radio presenter Paul Jones. Those are attributed on-site honors rather than proof of every claim about the archive's reach.

This is not just a history of blues recordings. It is evidence of an online community documenting live music while its memories were fresh, then choosing to keep the accumulation intact when its founder could no longer maintain it.

Browse the Earlyblues artist index and preserved festival history.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.