Monday Memory: Charles Bristol, the Metaverse Bluesman Who Changed the Course of My Career

From Charles Bristol's Metaverse Blues: 87 Year Old Bluesman Becomes Avatar-Based Musician In Second Life (2009):

When Charles Bristol was born in 1921, the electric guitar did not exist, and slavery was a living memory still, related to him by grandparents who worked beneath the lash themselves. But as fate would have it, Mr. Bristol would nonetheless live to see a black man made President, and perhaps just as unexpected, see himself made into an avatar, so he could extend his decades-long music career into something called the metaverse.

Second Life became Mr. Bristol's latest venue thanks to another blues musician, known in-world as Etherian Kamaboko,, who lives near him in North Carolina.

Accidentally coming across Mr. Bristol playing blues changed own my career course:

During my Making of Second Life book tour, a Los Angeles design group invited me to speak, and during sound check, casually asked me to show them what people did in Second Life for fun. I mentioned that many musicians performed live in SL, and randomly teleported into a ramshackle nightclub packed with dancing patrons.

And there CharlesEBristol Xi was, performing before a capacity crowd who were happy to hear him play, but evinced little surprise that someone so rare would be there in the first place. And the truly shocking thing was this: Up until then, I had no inkling he was in SL at all, encountering him now only by blind luck.

Who else was in there, I wondered, and how did a virtual world so comparatively small manage to attract people as rare as him?

I tell the rest of Mr. Bristol's metaverse story at the end of my latest book.