Blues Trio - Homesick Mac & Pera Joe...Y' All (2012) [CD Rip]

Certain artists take their style of music more serious than others. When it comes to preserving and advocating the style of acoustic guitar music we call Country blues, Dragan Rusic, better known as “Homesick Mac”, stands in the front line.

Dragan, born in 1960 in the city of Subotica in the former Yugoslavia, now Serbia, began playing the guitar at an early age. While still in his teens he played both bass and guitar in several bands, and in 1983 he formed the Blues Trio with harmonica player extra ordinaire Pera Joe (Patar Miladinovic) and mandolinist Kuki (Zoran Katrinka). They were soon to become “The Smallest Trio In The World” as the mandolinist left five years later. The Blues Trio is known to be the first acoustic blues/folk band in Eastern Europe and they released a couple of cassette-recordings, one LP and three CDs between 1987 and 2006.

For some years Dragan stayed and played alternatively in Serbia, Germany, Denmark and Sweden. With the outbreak of the Civil War in Yugoslavia he chose to not return, and he stayed in Germany to avoid being drafted. In 1992 he moved permanently to Sweden as he met his wife-to-be at a gig in Helsingborg, where he has lived ever since. “True love at first sight” he claims at an interview with theCountryblues.com. Soon after he also recorded his first solo album.

In 1995, he met British slide virtuoso Sam Mitchell at the Mojo Blues Club in Copenhagen. They hit it off immediately, and were soon sitting in at one another’s gigs, each finding a special chemistry that they rarely experienced with others. Within a year they recorded a CD and played frequently together until 1999, and kept in touch until Sam’s untimely death in 2006. Dragan loves to tell numerous stories about their time together.