By Bill Sullivan | Folsom Times, Oct 3,2026
What began as a college project tracing the journey of the blues from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago and eventually the West Coast has turned into a musical journey of its own — one that has lasted more than half a century. Delta Wires is still playing, still recording and still bringing its distinctive combination of harmonica, horns and hard-driving blues to stages across California and beyond.
On Sunday, Oct. 4, that road leads back to Historic Folsom when the California Blues Hall of Fame band takes the stage at Powerhouse Pub for the venue’s weekly Powerhouse of Blues series. The show begins at 3 p.m. at 614 Sutter St., bringing Delta Wires back to a venue the band has visited before, including an appearance earlier this year.
For a band whose story reaches back to 1970, staying this active is notable in itself. Delta Wires has never been a conventional blues band, however, and its beginnings were anything but conventional.
Saturday, October 3, 2026
The story starts with Ernie Pinata, the Oakland-born singer and harmonica player who would become the band’s longtime leader. Pinata began playing harmonica as a teenager, teaching himself by listening to blues artists including Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson and Muddy Waters.
By 1970, he wasn’t necessarily plotting a career leading a blues band. He was studying poetry and sociology while working toward a master’s degree in fine arts at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and his academic interests led him to study the migration of African American workers during World War II.
Part of that study focused on how people leaving the South carried their music with them to cities including Memphis, Chicago and Oakland. Instead of turning in a conventional sociology paper, Pinata decided to demonstrate that history through music.
He assembled what would become the first version of Delta Wires and constructed a presentation that followed the development of the blues. The musicians moved from a cappella field hollers and acoustic music associated with artists such as Robert Johnson and Son House into the amplified Chicago blues style popularized by Muddy Waters and other artists connected to Chess Records.
The idea was to illustrate how the blues changed as people and communities moved across the country. What had been created for the classroom, however, soon began developing a life outside it. After the presentation succeeded, Pinata began booking the group into Oakland clubs, where other musicians started sitting in and audiences responded to what they heard. What had been conceived as a temporary project kept growing, and by 1971 Delta Wires had become a professional working band.
The following year brought another significant moment when Delta Wires opened for Van Morrison and received a standing ovation. By then, the experiment designed to demonstrate the evolution of the blues was becoming part of the Bay Area blues story itself.
Delta Wires developed during an especially fertile period for Bay Area music, and Oakland became an important part of the band’s identity. The group worked clubs including Esther’s Orbit Room and the Continental Club in Oakland and Mandrake’s and the New Orleans House in Berkeley.
Those rooms put Delta Wires into a scene where musicians could find themselves playing alongside, opening for or simply crossing paths with some of the artists who had helped shape the music they were performing. Over the years, Delta Wires appeared with an extensive list of blues, soul and rock artists, including Van Morrison, John Lee Hooker, Freddie King, Bo Diddley, The Neville Brothers, Dr. John, Charlie Musselwhite, John Mayall and the Blues breakers, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, Lowell Fulson, Joe Louis Walker, Coco Montoya, Johnny Winter and Elvin Bishop.
The list stretches beyond the blues as well, with the band appearing on bills with The Doobie Brothers, Boz Scaggs, Pete Escovedo, Cold Blood, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Dave Mason, Jerry Garcia, Booker T. and Bad Company. Yet through those years, Delta Wires developed an identity that went well beyond the company it kept.
As the band evolved, horns became an increasingly important part of its sound. Pinata’s vocals and harmonica were joined by electric guitar, a driving rhythm section and a substantial horn presence,
allowing Delta Wires to move from traditional blues into R&B, soul, funk and jazz-influenced territory. That approach created a considerably bigger sound than the stripped-down guitar, bass and drums lineup commonly associated with a blues club. In many ways, the migration Pinata once set out to demonstrate in a classroom became part of the band’s musical DNA — Mississippi roots, Chicago electricity and a distinctly West Coast finish.
The classroom experiment eventually traveled much farther than Oakland. Delta Wires has appeared at the San Francisco Blues Festival, Russian River Blues Festival, Monterey Bay Blues Festival, Sacramento Jazz Jubilee and numerous other festivals and concert events, while its travels have also taken the band overseas to Italy’s Umbria Jazz Festival.
The group reached another milestone when it advanced to the finals of The Blues Foundation’s International Blues Challenge in Memphis in 2008. That same year, East Bay Express readers selected Delta Wires as Best Live Band, adding another hometown honor to a group that had already spent decades working Bay Area stages.
Another major recognition came in December 2012 when Delta Wires was inducted into the California Blues Hall of Fame. By then, the band had spent more than four decades taking the music that began as Pinata’s college project to clubs, festivals and stages far beyond Oakland.
Recording has remained another part of the band’s story, with Delta Wires releasing eight albums over its career. Its later work demonstrates how far the music traveled from the historical survey that originally brought the musicians together and how the band continued to develop its own musical identity.
Its seventh album, “Born in Oakland,” was particularly fitting for a group so closely tied to its hometown. The recording mixed original material with covers and showcased the combination of blues, R&B, funk and horn arrangements that had become central to the Delta Wires sound.
The band followed with “If Somebody Told Me”, continuing a recording career that has run alongside decades of live performances. Even after more than half a century, Delta Wires has continued adding music to its catalog rather than relying solely on recordings from its earlier years.
That continued in 2025 when the band released “Searching For A Woman” and its interpretation of the
Skip James blues standard “Devil Got My Woman.” The releases added another chapter to a catalog that has continued developing long after many bands from Delta Wires’ early years disappeared from the road.
The longevity is equally evident in the group’s 2026 performance schedule. This year has included appearances in San Francisco, Berkeley, Napa, Capitola, Benicia, Fairfield, Moraga and other Northern California communities, along with a June appearance at the Montone Blues Festival in Italy.
Delta Wires also played Powerhouse Pub in Folsom on March 1, making Sunday’s performance a return visit rather than an introduction to the Historic Folsom audience. After Sunday, the band’s October schedule continues with additional performances in San Francisco, Carson City and Pleasant Hill.
More than 50 years after Pinata assembled musicians to explain where the blues had been, Delta Wires remains on the road showing where that music can go. Its journey from an Oakland college project to a California Blues Hall of Fame band has become considerably longer than the history lesson that started it all.
That history comes together again Sunday afternoon when Delta Wires returns to the Powerhouse stage. For those unfamiliar with the group, this isn’t necessarily the quiet, stripped-down version of the blues the genre’s name can sometimes suggest.
Delta Wires built its reputation around a larger ensemble sound, with harmonica and horns helping drive music influenced by blues, soul, R&B, jazz and funk. Sunday’s appearance also offers a chance to see a band with a direct connection to a formative period in Northern California music history — one that began playing Oakland and Berkeley clubs in the early 1970s and managed to keep evolving rather than becoming merely a remembrance of that era.
Delta Wires performs Sunday, Oct. 4, from 3 to 6 p.m. as part of Powerhouse of Blues at Powerhouse Pub, 614 Sutter St. in Historic Folsom. The show is for ages 21 and over, bringing more than five decades of the band’s blues history back to Sutter Street for a Sunday afternoon performance.