For the past 12 years, Jeff Harris has been spinning the blues with Gary Reinhard on Bad Dog Blues, heard every Sunday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on WITR. Bad Dog shined the spotlight on everything from vintage Piedmont cats to today's Blind Pig artists. But Harris's love has always been in even earlier blues music, and he's moved on in pursuit.

Harris launched his new show, Big Road Blues, earlier this month. It airs Sundays 5 to 7 p.m. on Jazz 90.1 WGMC.

"This is going to be a narrower focus," Harris says. "Big Road Blues is going to be an exploration of blues from the 20's through the 70's. Most shows are going to be theme shows." Upcoming programs will include the music of New Orleans legend Dave Bartholomew, all-live recordings of Muddy Waters, and an entire show dedicated to Texas piano blues from the 20's and 30's.

Harris won't be spinning anything remotely new, with Albert King, Fenton Robinson, Hound Dog Taylor, and other artists who recorded up until the 1970's just getting in under the wire.

"Bad Dog Blues was great," he says. "But they expected us to play a lot of newer blues. And to be honest, my heart is firmly in the 20's, 30's, and 40's."

Whitey won't get much airplay, either.

"I have nothing against" white blues players, says Harris, who is white himself. But the blues "was originally music for African-Americans, played by African-Americans, and listened to by African-Americans," he says. "It was music that came out of the segregation era. After the 1960's, the blues' meaning and context changed."

The new show will offer an in-depth crash course in the blues, its culture, its history, and its characters, he says.

More information's available on Harris's website.