You could say that Mark Hummel's career in the blues is rooted in ignorance. Just not his own.

A few years ago, Hummel's reviews of books about harpist Little Walter and guitar legend Mike Bloomfield were published. "The main reason I started writing," he said in a recent interview, is because so many writers "didn't seem to have a whole lot of knowledge about the music." Now the noted West Coast harmonica player in the trademark porkpie hat has broadened that desire to educate as a contributing writer to the online blues magazine BluesWax (http://www.blueswax.com), where he especially enjoys interviewing musicians whom he thinks deserve more recognition.

Chris Vallillo studied archeology in college, but when that didn't suit him professionally, he decided to give music a shot.

"I figured if I was going to starve, I was going to go ahead and try to play music and just see if I could make a living at it," he said in an interview last week.

But Vallillo's vocational choices aren't all that different: Both archeology and the study of folk music involve the excavation of artifacts to help illuminate the way people lived deep in the past. Vallillo - a singer, songwriter, guitarist, and folklorist based out of Macomb - is one of the main-stage performers at the Midwest Folk Festival this weekend in Bishop Hill, Illinois.

"I'll tell you a cute little story," began Ray Voss, president of the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Society. "There used to be an author in town, who passed away a few years ago. His name was David Collins. And he's written about 75 books - mostly for children - and he was also a teacher. Rich Johnson [the Bix society's music director] had been trying to get him to write a book about Bix, and he never wanted to do it.

"But one day in [Collins'] class, he said, 'Does anybody know who Bix Beiderbecke is?' So one kid got up and said, 'Yeah. He's the guy that's named after a run.'"

Voss then laughs, and says, in reference to 1998's Bix Beiderbecke: Jazz Age Genius, "So Dave got busy and wrote this really nice little book."

That is a cute little story.

So ...

... how many of your kids think Bix is named after a run?

Think about Sade, the cool and exotic British chanteuse known for "Smooth Operator." Now consider the "Texas Man" with an eye patch, Mike Morgan, whom Guitar World called "a genuine blues guitar hero" known for his incendiary playing. Mike's got all Sade's records and loves her jazz band.

And on his next album, which is currently in pre-production, "I've got one song I could really hear her recording," he said in a recent phone interview.

That's in addition to Morgan-penned numbers such as a "radio-friendly rootsy-rock song" that he and his band the Crawl have tried out live, an Otis Redding-like ballad, a couple of R&B "Al Green-ish-type things," a Louisiana-style ballad, a few shuffles, some "funky things," and "a Marvin Gaye ‘What's Goin' On' thing - I've never recorded anything like that."