Growing up in an era when many black Americans were abandoning the blues, seeing the once-popular style as a reminder of a painful history, Taj Mahal said he was shielded from some of that because his family embraced not only the blues that was happening in the 1950s and early ’60s, but jazz and Afro-Caribbean music, too. “Some people wouldn’t listen to blues or jazz or R&B. It was all considered low-class.

They missed the point,” the guitarist and singer said by phone from his East Bay home recently. “I didn’t realize I had an objective component by having a Caribbean parent. They liked Africa! They liked Africans! They liked being black. They weren’t driven by all the distractions that make people crazy here. “I was lucky to have my parents, my mother being a black American from the South and my dad being a black man from the Caribbean.

The music he came from and listened to and brought to me was wide open.” And so while many blacks of his generation had a certain antipathy toward the blues, Mahal has carved out a lifelong career as one of the most prominent acoustic blues artists from the 1970s to the present. But if he’s considered primarily a blues artist, Mahal has also recorded with everyone from African musicians to Hawaiian artists.

He said, though, that such an approach is wholly consistent with the real history of the blues, which never existed in isolation. “If you were a musician from the South, you’re not going to play only slow blues, you’re going to play whatever people will pay you to play,” he said.