A Blue Man's Plaintive Wails

A BLUE MAN'S PLAINTIVE WAILS

The July 17, 1997 installment of my blues column for Out & About, a now-defunct central Indiana entertainment weeky

By Barney Quick

It's quite a summer for blues activity. The calendar is filling up with great shows, folks are recording, and you, all-important readers, are thinking and reflecting on what blues is all about.

Terry Porter is currently very bullish on Dwight Edwards. Porter is CEO of Flat Rock Records, a central Indiana label he runs out of a one-hundred-fifty-year-old farm house. He is working on a European tour for Edwards some time this year. If you haven't heard Edwards, let me tell you he's immediately convincing. He represented Indiana in last year's international unsigned blues competition in Memphis, Tennessee. His new CD, Out of the Blue, shows how his guitar playing and vocals have come together as a seamless package. Speaking of blues competitions, the Blues Society of Indiana is hosting its annual Best Unsigned Blues Competition Sunday, July 20, at its headquarters at 6851 North Michigan Road in Indianapolis. You can hear the music of nine up-and-coming bands for the reasonable price of $3 for Society members or $5 for non-members. Beer and wine will be served. For more details (or membership information), call (317) 253-2421.

Stuart and Cathi Norton report some interesting developments. Cathi's new album is coming along nicely. She's also writing about the music she loves in regular columns in Blues Revue, American Harmonica Review, a British periodical called Harmonica World, and an Internet publication called Delta Snake Blues.

Stuart is performing somewhat regularly, focusing on old-timey acoustic stuff, in the vein of Mance Lipscomb, Ida Cox, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and the like. He has also been asked to play harp on Duke Tomato's next album. I'll try to have more details about this next time.

I recently got a great letter from Michael Johnson of The Walking Catfish. (Michael: I missed your July 11 show at the Gables, but I'll really try to make the one on July 24.) His letter included some thoughtful remarks about the danger to blues from the obsession with form. He was responding to my musings about the relative importance of the one-four-five form to the preservation of the blues. He says that a lot of young players perfect such trappings as "gravelly voice [and] loud, overdriven guitar . . . that are incidental to the music." He feels that the key to authenticity in blues is finding a sense of triumph over threats to identity. This leads us to yet another of those Big, Basic Blues Questions: does one have to "pay dues," and, if so, what kind and degree?

It seems to me there aren't objective standards for what constitutes dues. Lots of people of all races have worked on plantations, and in meat-packing plants and steel mills without ever emitting a soulful cry with their voices, guitars or saxophones. Conversely, some people with backgrounds of relative material comfort are so constituted that they react from the cores of their beings to life's inevitable rough edges.

So, Michael, I agree with your premise that, after learning the technique, you have to have that hard-to-define something called soul, but I don't think we can judge someone else's dues-paying experience. The proof is in the music, anyway. It's either perfunctory or sublime.

That's why I'm not concerned about eager young players of all backgrounds getting involved in our local blues scene. Blues fans are some of the most insistent of music lovers when it comes to wanting feeling in their music. The wheat will get separated from the chaff, and beginners with potential will be exposed to the levels of soulfulness that it is possible to obtain.

I love to kick ideas and opinions around. As always, you can contact me through Out-n-About or at (812) 372-6018 or Beecue@aol.com.

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