Blue People

When I opened the door, the sound of the guitar caught my nape and reached my soul, never letting go. Few things in this world are as powerful as wild, primal and blues guitars. With the hands of a master musician, the bark and bark of the guitar. It cries and howls. It cries. It barks, and it screams. The blues guitar can reach out to your body and tear your soul.

Bruce is an emotional art form. It’s a musical style that is born in the heart and sung directly from the soul. The blues singer covers the entire range of emotional spectrum. Capture the full range of human experience. Bruceman sings about headaches and broken hearts, desires and love, betrayal and anger, hope and happiness. But at best, Bruce is about redemption. It’s a sensation that can encourage you to hurt your knees or get taller with your feet. And that was blues music for me-my redemption soundtrack. In Howlin’Wolf’s words, “Bruce can fill you with low sorrow that has hurt you badly, you want you to die, or it can make you fall in love.”

And that’s exactly what Bruce 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 black American art.

So when I joined the River Street Jazz Club nearly a decade ago, I never thought I was walking towards my collective past and personal future.

My sister and I, who grew up with five children, were the only children of color. In fact, until I was in my late teens, my sister was the only other black face I’ve ever seen. My mother was a little lily white woman with black hair and big brown eyes. Sadly, she was also a mean, uneducated racist with black music, black art, and a strong hatred for blacks. My mother had many rules of the house. One of those rules was to never use music, especially black music, at home or on car radios. On a rare occasion when I broke the rules, my mother was pushed into the living room and stared directly into my child’s eyes.

Drop her voice an octave-breathtaking mayonnaise and kielbasa-she will complain terribly, “Son, you’re away from those niggers.” A viper’s tongue and dripping poison, she whispered terribly, “They cut through your throat and stab you in your back when you don’t expect it the most.” Then, as a final refrain, add one octave higher, “Now turn off that divine shit music and get out of my face!”

But when I passed through the rusty stealing door on Tuesday, when I was 23 or 24, I left it all behind.

Oddly enough, a white French-Canadian poet and an American outlaw writer named Jack Kerouac guided me through my past prisons for my future freedom. I was a young man and was interested in everything. I was reading about beat writers and was passionate about everything. I was crazy about the world and crazy about life. I was crazy about art and books. I was enthusiastic about poetry and music. As Henry David Thoreau once said, “I entered the forest because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the bone marrow of my life.” For black American men, our history, language, and music are the “forest” of our saying. I was walking in the wild when I stepped into a smoky, upscale juke joint called the River Street Jazz Club in Planes, Pennsylvania. I was rediscovering some of my people who had long been lost in American culture.

Historically, being born black in the United States has little social benefit, but blues music is one of our rare cultural heritage sites. Bruce is a testament to our suffering. It is a means of “witnessing” the atrocities of our origin in the United States. And beyond that, Bruce “witnesses” the human soul-from the depth of greed and desire to the peak of love and tenderness. I have and will continue to be part of me who is essentially attracted to the struggles and victories of the oppressed people-and don’t make a mistake about it. Bruce is a form of art created by people who have been oppressed and confiscated in the United States.

At the River Street Jazz Club on Tuesday night, open mic night, the joints were almost empty. Some of the patrons there were middle-aged, well-dressed, upper-class white men. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t there for the crowd, or even for the girls. It was curiosity that drove me there. It was my people who were screaming in the heavy hustle and bustle of history that had to go me. It was destined to land me on that special night.

I was fortunate enough to be able to walk an exceptional set. Although there were only a handful of regulars in the audience, the local blues legend Clarence Spady played as if the devil himself owned him. Clarence is a small, middle-aged, dark-skinned black man from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Once hailed as the “future of the blues,” he is also one of the “worst guitar slinger” on the planet. His father was a legendary blues guitarist. Without his nasty heroin habits, the name Clarence Spady would be synonymous with blues. He will be with BB King, Buddy Guy and Muddy Waters.

That night, the Clarence Spadi Trio took us all on an enthusiastic journey through the history of the blues. Originating in the Mississippi Delta, he performed songs such as “Dust My Broom” and “Illinois Blues.” I sat there while he covered Chicago’s uptown rhythm and blues hits “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Spoonfull.” After playing Grease Drippin’s funk classics such as “Cissy Strut” and “Pick Up the Pieces”, he finished the set with a faithful Hendrix rendition of “Little Wing”.

I have never seen or heard such a thing in my life. His fingers flew across the guitar like the forces of nature. Indeed, the man was a six-string hurricane-pure raw energy and primitive energy. But there was one song that remained with me, especially over the years. It’s a cover of Robert Johnson titled “Crossroads Blues”.

Robert Johnson is a legend-Faust’s myth in the year of Bruce’s history. As a young man, Johnson hung around juke joints and honky-tonks, praising renowned bluesmen like Son House and Charley Patton. At that time, young Robert Johnson was unable to play for the dead. He just sat there and admired the hero. When the guitar fell into Johnson’s hands, Robert sounded like a roaring cat, so the other musicians left the room. Then one day the story goes on, Robert came in, sat down, and captivated the crowd with his eerie performances. He blew legendary players Son House and Charley Patton off the stage. The new king of the blues has arrived and a legend is born. However, Johnson disappeared as soon as he arrived. It was rumored that Johnson died on all fours, barked, barked like a dog, and sold his soul to the devil in exchange for another world’s guitar skills.

Robert Johnson wrote “Cross Road Blues” in his early twenties. Most people think this song is about a deal with the devil, but for me it had a completely different meaning that night. Johnson tells the story of a lonely and frightened black man walking on a dark road late at night. “I went down to the intersection and fell on my knees. I went down to the intersection and fell on my knees,” he wrote. When Clarence sang the first line, I knew that the lonely and frightened black man was me. I also realized that my people’s music and their history are my lonely dark roads.

The second poem begins with one of the saddest lines ever written in a blues idiom. Johnson writes: “Hmm, the sun sets, boy, Dark Gon” catches me here. .. It’s the same kind of loneliness I’ve spent with me for the rest of my life-the deep and deep sorrow that penetrates from the hole in my stomach to the bottom of my soul. It was a kind of loneliness that took me from home to the River Street Jazz Club alone on Tuesday night.

I wish I could say that “Crossroad Blues” was over happily. it’s not. But I can happily report that my story is.

Listening to the blues for the first time was like finding a religion. I sat alone in the club, crouched white and sweated. I knew I had a guitar on the spot. In fact, I knew I would die if I didn’t die, so I stopped working the next day and looked at a local pawnshop until I found a guitar that felt just right-a worn-out, fat-bodied Yamaha acoustic. With a guitar in my hand, I threw $ 250 (don’t worry about rent!) At the counter and walked from the pawnshop to the rest of my life.

I’ve owned a few guitars over the years, played hundreds of shows, and discovered countless guitarists, but for Clarence Spady and the gift he gave that night I There are always vacant seats in the heart bar: a lifelong love affair with the blues, and a visceral connection between my heritage and my people, the blues people.