Is it a blues act or just acting blue?

Musician Guy Davis says he wants blacks to reclaim the acoustic blues, an idiom 'that's part of our DNA.' He might have to lose the country garb to manage it

 

By Brad Wheeler

 

Columbus, Ohio - The blues are on sale here, and the buyers are white. Sitting up against an entertainment district that sprouted around the city's new hockey arena is Blues Station, a theme club of sorts, complete with Southern cuisine and false walls of corrugated tin and weathered wooden planks. Another wall features a mural-sized map of the Mississippi Delta.

 

If the room is fake, the performer certainly has bona fide credentials. He is David (Honeyboy) Edwards, born in 1917 in Greenwood, Miss., the audience is told. (Edwards, who appears in Antoine Fuqua's new concert film Lightning in a Bottle, was actually born in 1915, and in Shaw, not Greenwood.) Making the introduction is the club's owner -- a Morgan Freeman look-alike with a penchant for beginning every third sentence with the words "But in the meantime."

 

"But in the meantime, y'all ready for some old blues?" After the predominantly white audience indicates with applause and some whooping that it is, Honeyboy begins to play. A weathered, dark man dressed in pinstriped slacks and shirts, with a vest and ball cap, he performs acoustic blues, lonesome stuff. "Don't say I don't love you darlin', just because I stay out all night long," he sings, in a choked, soft voice. "I'm a country man, country man, country man, and I just don't know right from wrong."

 

And on like that, all night long -- Sweet Home Chicago, Catfish Blues, numbers he's played for decades. Numbers he may have learned from the great Robert Johnson, a running mate of Edwards in the 1930s. It's what the buyers want. A passage from his autobiography, The World Don't Owe Me Nothing, illustrates that nothing has changed in that regard, not for 70 years.

 

"I'd play anything anybody asked for because sometimes you had to get on both sides of the street, play whatever the people want to hear. Because they'll give you that money! I'd hear one of those old records on the [jukebox], listen to it about twice, all them old different old blues . . . then if people say, 'Play that and I'll give you a quarter,' I could play it, I could make that quarter."

 

The audience for acoustic blues is far smaller now than it was in the early 1900s, particularly in black communities. An acoustic blues artist in Harlem could probably still get that quarter, but not much more, and only if he promised to shoo over to the other side of street before he played.

 

Under these depressed conditions, Guy Davis, age 42, continues his campaign to reunite black audiences with a music he cherishes. Legacy, the title of his new album, refers to a mission to help fellow blacks reclaim their acoustic-blues birthright.

 

"The music is too beautiful," the musician says, over the phone from a Belgian hotel, "it's too much of a treasure."

 

It is a tricky undertaking. To stem the growing tide of lack of interest in acoustic blues would be one thing, to turn it would be another. According to Davis, in the early part of the 1900s, blues was a curiosity, an interesting and beautiful way of doing music, but the perception didn't last. "Black folks, since slave times, have had no place to look but forward to tomorrow, to the future, and acoustic blues music represents the past. It looks back into times of pain, times of sorrow, times of hurt."

 

White audiences, as part of the folk-music resurgence of the 1960s, rediscovered black acoustic players long forgotten. Men like Edwards, Son House, Skip James and Sleepy John Estes were seen as some sort of historical museum artifacts. But Davis wants to go even further than a similar revival today -- he desires that blacks not only wake up to acoustic blues, but to "reclaim" the idiom. "Black folks have to say 'this is ours, it is a record of our history, it is a part of our blood, part of our DNA.' "

 

One dilemma, according to blues writer and musician Elijah Wald, author of Escaping the Delta, is the issue of venues. "The problem is not that black people don't like acoustic blues, but that they are very rarely played in rooms where one normally finds many black people." As well, Wald finds the presentation of the music a roadblock. "Middle-class black people who would applaud, say, Wynton Marsalis, would probably be more interested in acoustic blues if it did not come dressed in overalls. There is nothing wrong with rural life, music or dress, but black Americans left the rural South for very good reasons."

 

So, Davis might have erred in choosing his album art -- an illustration of the musician in country garb with an acoustic guitar. Moreover, the portrait of Davis as a country bluesman is somewhat deceptive -- the son of the noted actors, directors and activists Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee was born and raised in New York. Upon seeing the performer for the first time, Wald was struck by the fact that nothing Davis said or sung hinted at his New York roots. "It seemed like a very effective one-man show about a rural blues singer, rather than a concert by a contemporary musician from Manhattan."

 

A contemporary musician from Manhattan who writes lines in his songs like "Hitch up my buggy/ Saddle my black mare," Davis, an actor as well as a musician, is elusive when asked about the role of theatre in his blues shows. "Let's just say I'm a mystery," he responds. "Folks will just have to come and decide for themselves."

 

Honeyboy Edwards played Toronto's Rivoli club in the early 1980s, and musician Paul Reddick remembers. "Between sets, people crowded around him, asking him about Robert Johnson. Honeyboy wasn't interested in talking about it, and he got up to leave."

 

Sensing that Edwards would take more pride in his own automobile than any association with Johnson, Reddick inquired as to the car Honeyboy was driving. "A Cadillac!" was the boastful reply. Together, they walked to another room, Reddick following Edwards, who shuffled hunched-over and slowly. As soon as they passed from view, Edwards straightened up and quickened his pace. "He was giving them what they wanted," Reddick says. "He was playing the old bluesman."

 

Later, when Edwards walked back among the audience, in his exaggerated doddering gait, he turned to Reddick and winked.

 

November 17, 2004

 

Source: Globeandmail.com

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