Blues people
When I opened the door, the sound of the guitar grabbed me by the neck, touched my soul and never let go. There are few things in this world as wild, as primitive, or as powerful as the blues guitar. In the hands of a master musician, the guitar screeches and screeches; cry and howl; he wails and howls; scream and scream. The blues guitar can reach out and rip the soul out of your body.
The blues is an emotional art form. It is a musical style born in the heart and sung directly from the soul. Blues singers cover the entire emotional spectrum. Capturing the full range of the human experience. Blues musicians sing about headaches and heartbreak, lust and love, betrayal and rage, hope and happiness. But at its best, the blues is about redemption. It’s a sensation that can cut your knees or inspire you to stand tall on your own two feet. And that’s what blues music was to me: the soundtrack of my redemption. In the words of Howling Wolf, “The Blues can fill you with deep sadness that hurts so much that you wish you were dead, or it can make you fall in love too.”
And that’s exactly what the blues did for me. It gave me the confidence to stand tall; it connected me with my people; and it helped me sing my song and add it to the rich tapestry of American black art.
So when I walked into The River Street Jazz Club almost ten years ago, I had no idea that I was walking into my collective past and into my individual future.
Growing up in a litter of five, my sister and I were the only children of color. In fact, my sister was the only other black face I had ever seen until I was a teenager. My mother was a small, lily-white woman with dark hair and big brown eyes. Sadly, she was also a spiteful and uneducated racist with a great hatred for black music, black art, and black people. My mother had many house rules. One of those rules was absolutely no music, especially black music, at home or on the car radio. On the rare occasions when I broke the rule, my mother would stampede into the living room and stare directly into my son’s eyes.
Lowering his voice an octave – his breath reeked of mayonnaise and kielbasa – he complained sternly, “Son, stay away from those blacks.” With a viper’s tongue and dripping venom, he whispered hoarsely, “They will cut your throat and stab you in the back when you least expect it.” Then, as a final chorus, an octave higher, he would add, “Now turn off that damn black music and get out of my face!”
But when I walked through the rusty steel door on a Tuesday, at the age of twenty-three or twenty-four, I was leaving everything behind forever.
Interestingly, a white French-Canadian poet and American outlaw writer named Jack Kerouac helped guide me through the prison of my past to the freedom of my future. He was a young man and was curious about everything. I had been reading about beat writers and was passionate about everything. He was crazy about the world and crazy about life. He was crazy about art and books; I was enthusiastic about poetry and music. As Henry David Thoreau once said: “I went to the forest because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow out of life.” For black men in America, our history, our language, and our music are our proverbial “forests.” When I walked into an exclusive smoke-filled music venue in Plains, Pennsylvania called The River Street Jazz Club, I was walking into nature. I was rediscovering a part of my long-lost people in American culture.
Historically speaking, there are few social advantages to being born black in America, but blues music is one of our rare cultural heritages. The Blues is a testament to our suffering. It is a means of “bearing witness” to the atrocities of our origins in the United States. And beyond that, Blues “bears witness” to the human soul, from the depths of greed and lust, to the heights of love and goodness. There was, and always will be, a part of me intrinsically drawn to the struggles and triumphs of the oppressed, and make no mistake about it; Blues is an art form created by the oppressed and dispossessed in America.
It was Tuesday night, open mic night, at the River Street Jazz Club, and the venue was almost empty. The few customers were middle-aged, well-dressed, upper-class white men. But I didn’t mind. He wasn’t there for the crowd or even the girls. It was curiosity that led me there. It was my people screaming through the loud din of history that forced me to go. It was fate that brought me to the audience on that very special night.
I was fortunate to enter an exceptional setting. Although there were only a handful of regulars in the audience, local blues legend Clarence Spady played as if the devil himself had possessed him. Clarence is a small, middle-aged, dark-skinned black man from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Once hailed as “the future of the blues,” he’s also one of the “meanest guitar slingers” on the planet. His father was a legendary blues guitarist, and if it weren’t for his nasty heroin habit, Clarence Spady’s name would be synonymous with Blues. He would be at the height of BB King, Buddy Guy and Muddy Waters.
That night, the Clarence Spady Trio took us all on an exciting journey through blues history. From his origins in the Mississippi Delta, he played songs like “Dust My Broom” and “Illinois Blues.” I sat there, gaping and mesmerized, as he covered uptown Chicago rhythms and blues hits like “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Spoonfull.” He even played fat funk classics like “Cissy Strut” and “Pick Up the Pieces” before finishing the set with a faithful Hendrix rendition of “Little Wing.”
I’ve never seen or heard anything like it in my life. His fingers flew over the guitar like a force of nature. In truth, the man was a six-wire hurricane, pure raw primal energy. But there was one song in particular that stuck with me over the years: a Robert Johnson cover titled “Crossroads Blues.”
Robert Johnson is a legend, a Faustian myth in the annual blues history. As a young man, Jonson would hang out at juke and honkey-tonks venues admiring established blues musicians like Son House and Charlie Patton. At the time, young Robert Johnson couldn’t play for dead. He would just sit there admiring his heroes. When the guitar reached Johnson’s hands, the other musicians would leave the room because Robert sounded like a howling cat. Then one day, the story goes, Robert walked in, sat down, and wowed the crowd with his supernatural play. He took the legendary Son House and Charlie Patton off the stage. The new king of the blues had arrived and a legend had been born. But Johnson left almost as soon as he arrived. Dying on all fours, barking and howling like a mad dog, Johnson was rumored to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his otherworldly guitar skills.
Robert Johnson wrote “Crossroad Blues” when he was in his early twenties. Most people think the song is about his dealing with the devil, but for me, that night, it took on a completely different meaning. Johnson tells the story of a scared and lonely black man who walks down a dark road late at night. He writes: “I went down to the crossroads and fell to my knees. I went down to the crossroads and fell to my knees.” As Clarence sang the opening lines, I knew that the scared and lonely black man was me, and I also realized that the music of my people and their history was my dark and lonely path.
The second verse begins with one of the saddest lines ever written in the language of the blues. Johnson writes: “Mmmm, the sun is going down boy, the dark will get me here. Oooo, eeee, boy, the dark will get me here. I don’t have a sweet, loving woman who loves and feels my care.” of loneliness that I lived my whole life: a deep and profound sadness that penetrates from the pit of my stomach to the bottom of my soul. It was the kind of loneliness that brought me from my home to the River Street Jazz Club just on a Tuesday night.
I wish I could tell you that “Crossroad Blues” ends happily. It is not like this. But I can happily report that my story does.
Hearing blues for the first time was like finding religion. I sat there alone in the club, white-knuckled and drenched with sweat. I knew right then and there that I would have a guitar. In fact, I knew I’d die if I didn’t, so I stopped work the next day and scoured the local pawn shops until I found the guitar that felt good: a fat-bodied, worn-out Yamaha acoustic. . Guitar in hand, I threw two hundred and fifty dollars (to hell with the rent!) On the counter and walked out of the pawnshop for the rest of my life.
I’ve owned a handful of guitars, played hundreds of shows, and discovered countless guitarists over the years, but there will always be an empty seat at my heart’s bar for Clarence Spady and the gifts he gave that night – quite a life. love affair with the blues and a visceral connection to my heritage and my blues people.