This edition of *Blues Before Sunrise* is built like a long summer day: it begins in a hazy jazz glow, passes through crowded streets, juke joints, sanctuaries, and blues clubs, then returns to twilight with the same melody that opened the broadcast. The program’s annual salute to summer is more than a collection of warm-weather titles. Across five hours, it becomes a musical journey through the ways African American artists have given sound to heat, longing, humor, faith, love, and survival.

The first hour establishes the theme through repeated readings of George and Ira Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Duke Ellington gives the tune orchestral sweep; Charlie Parker makes it quick and angular; Miles Davis cools it into spacious modern jazz. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald make it a conversation, while Al Hibbler, the Ravens, Sam Cooke, Billie Holiday, Sidney Bechet, Wes Montgomery, and Bro. Jack McDuff each reveal a different emotional color. The sequence is a reminder that a standard does not endure by standing still. It survives because musicians keep remaking it in their own voices. Nat King Cole’s “Guess I’ll Go Back Home This Summer” and Shirley Horn’s “Estate” add memory and late-day reflection.

The second hour leaves the summer sky for the street. Charles Brown’s “Race Track Blues,” Wynonie Harris’s “Good Morning Judge,” Bull Moose Jackson’s “Chilin’ Switch,” and Tiny Bradshaw’s “Walk the Chalkline” bring risk, comedy, and hard-driving rhythm. Cecil Gant’s two selections make room for romantic disappointment and economic pressure, while Ida Cox, Ethel Waters, Coot Grant, and Sox Wilson reconnect the show with classic blues storytelling. The hour then turns toward gospel with the Wright Brothers, Black Billy Sunday, the Soul Stirrers, and the Radio Four. Blues and sacred music are not presented as opposites; instead, the playlist lets them share the same terrain of trouble, hope, and testimony.

Hour Three moves deeper into the prewar era. Pinetop Smith, Sippie Wallace, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Peg Leg Howell, Jim Jackson, Lil Johnson, and their peers demonstrate why old 78s still sound alive. Their records hold work songs, sexual bravado, comic complaint, travel, weather, and dancing in remarkably compact performances. The piano rolls, guitars answer the singers, and harmonica cuts through the air. This is blues at its most direct: unsentimental, funny, occasionally rough, and always conscious of the room it was made to move.

The fourth hour brings the program’s electric summit. Elmore James launches it with slide-guitar urgency, followed by the towering presence of Howling Wolf. Bobby Bland and Junior Parker add polished Memphis feeling; T-Bone Walker brings sophistication and jazz-inflected guitar; and Lightnin’ Hopkins, Alexander Moore, and Lil’ Son Jackson lead the set back toward Texas. The contrast is the point. Electric blues contains sharp-edged slide work, gravelly vocals, elegant horn-era phrasing, lone-guitar intimacy, and deep regional character.

The final hour returns to “Summertime,” but the reprise has earned its weight. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Smith and Lou Donaldson, Charles Mingus, Red Garland, Sam Cooke, Sarah Vaughan, Don Byas, Red Saunders, and Bro. Jack McDuff continue finding new routes through the melody. “Summertime Gal” by the Basin Street Boys and the Jubilaires’ “As Summer Turns to Fall” widen the seasonal picture. By the closing organ, summer has become a setting for an entire musical heritage: not simply sunshine, but memory, motion, loss, romance, spiritual strength, and renewal. That breadth is what makes this five-hour broadcast so satisfying. It honors the past without treating the music as distant, allowing every record to arrive in the present tense. It leaves listeners fully sure that summer’s music still belongs to everyone.