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Fog City Blues

Remembering Ben Manilla and House of Blues Radio

The veteran Bay Area radio producer, who passed away in September, would have been 72 this Sunday.

The House of Blues Radio Hour (later Elwood's Bluesmobile) was the longest-running syndicated blues radio program in the country, hosted by Dan Aykroyd and produced in San Francisco by Ben Manilla Productions. Earlier this year, FCB host Devon Strolovitch spoke to Ben to celebrate the acquisition by the Library of Congress of the complete HoB archive of 25 years of broadcasts and 2,000 raw interviews with blues musicians past and present. Sunday, December 8 at 4:00 pm.

Devon Strolovitch studied medieval Judeo-Portuguese manuscripts and earned a PhD in Linguistics from Cornell University before coming to KALW. He is the Senior Producer of Philosophy Talk, and since 2007 has hosted Fog City Blues, the weekly digest of Blues in the Bay Area and beyond.