Best Blues Artist

Not long ago, Otis Taylor was a Boulder antiques broker, and uninformed observers of the local music community considered him to be something of an antique. How wrong they were. In the mid-'90s, Taylor reinvented himself as a modern bluesman, and since then, he's earned the kind of critical acclaim that most artists never experience. He's nominated for four W.C. Handy awards -- the blues equivalent of the Grammys -- and he probably won't leave Memphis empty-handed when the awards are distributed next month. After all, his latest disc, 2003's Truth Is Not Fiction, on Telarc Records, was named one of the top ten albums of the year in any genre by the New York Times and wound up on two different top-ten lists in the Washington Post. Some antique.