Joachim Blume was born on March 3, 1935 in Berlin-Hermsdorf as the second child of Heinz Blume, a radio engineering official, and of his wife Charlotte. After the confusion of the last years of the second world war and the death of his parents he was raised by relatives in Wuppertal. There he was able to go to regular school again and have music lessons with his "grandfather" Adolf Zimmermann: piano and first instruction in harmony, form, and composition.

Since his first compositional attempts, a concert piece for violoncello and orchestra and his cantatas, were seen as anachronistic by experts, he ended his studies at the Gymnasium and became a steel-girder construction locksmith. His other passion was bridge and crane construction. He then worked in this field in Bielefeld, but continued to compose. Since his retirement in 1995 he has been using Capella software to sort through and complete his accumulation of musical sketches.