DELTA WIRES

Delta Wires began as homework. Ernie Pinata, an Oakland native playing harmonica at Bay Area jams since sixteen, was a student at the California College of Arts and Crafts when he staged a performance for credit tracing the blues from Mississippi field hollers to Chicago's South Side. The musicians he gathered kept playing, first at Oakland clubs like Esther's Orbit Room and the Continental Club, and after a night with Buddy Guy and Junior Wells at Keystone Berkeley they started opening for them.

The 2008 lineup on the profile was Pinata on harmonica and vocals, his boyhood friend Tom Gerrits on bass, Richard Healy on guitar, Tony Huszar on drums, and a horn section of Larry Jonutz, Jim Orsetti and Danny Sandoval. The four-man core is unchanged; by 2017 the horns were Gerry Jonutz, David Bowman and John Christensen. The band's own motto covers the sound: hot-wired, big band harmonica and horns blues, with Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson and Bobby Bland as influences.

The first album, Delta Wires, came out on Mud Slide Records in April 1991, and the profile counted four CDs by 2008, among them the live set Take Off Your Pajamas. An Anthology appeared in 2013, Born in Oakland followed on Mudslide in June 2017 as the seventh album, and If Somebody Told Me arrived in January 2023.

2008, the year the profile was written, was a good one: finalists at the Blues Foundation's International Blues Challenge in Memphis, chosen from around a hundred blues-society entrants, and Best Band in Oakland Magazine's readers' poll. East Bay Express readers later named them Best Live Band, and in December 2012 the band entered the California Blues Hall of Fame. They have shared bills with Van Morrison, Boz Scaggs, Freddie King and John Lee Hooker, and played the San Francisco Blues Festival, Monterey Bay Blues Festival and Umbria Jazz in Perugia.