Art with a touch of trouble in its walk

Oct. 16, 2008

Dear Leslie,

DC and I traveled to Columbia, Mo., a few weekends ago for the city's annual Roots, Blues and BBQ Festival. Thousands of people who appreciate the relationship between smoky meat and smoky music crowded the downtown streets to hear both local and famous musicians. Buddy Guy was there. Almost 20 years ago a young female co-worker told me she was in love with him, and she meant it. It's understandable. His smile blazes as hot as the screams from his guitar.

Playing here a few years ago, he stalked the aisles with his guitar and sang a low-down hootchie-cootchie tune to a young female usher whose embarrassment showed. Perhaps she'd never been looked up and down by an old bluesman before.

When someone in the audience was foolish enough to yell out a request, Guy did not tell him to shut up politely. With the possible exception of B.B. King, every great bluesman I've ever seen had a glint of meanness in his eye, a touch of trouble in his walk.

Sometimes art is mean, or at least not friendly. Last weekend at the River Campus the Battleworks Dance Company performed athletically and artistically but didn't move me. I want to be pushed off a cliff and fall into a new world listening to music or watching dance or theater. The dancers had extraordinary abilities, but their frenetic movements — even to Bach — mostly left me nervous. My nightmare vision of the end of the world includes people spastically trying to relate to each other, to relocate their humanness. And they can't.

Perhaps this was indeed one of those new worlds, and it's too alien for me. But most everyone who's lived has a familiarity with the blues, whether admitted or not. It's the music beneath the surface of life, beneath the polite thank-yous and good mornings, down where our shadows grope for light.

A Nashville, Tenn., musician who visits Cape Girardeau writes and sings blues songs that sometimes mention Van Gogh or make literary references. Sorry, but it's about feeling, being up and down, about being broken and busted in every way. It's visceral, not cerebral. It doesn't swing, it throbs like a wound or a swooning heart.

Buddy Guy grew up on a plantation in Louisiana in the 1930s. His first guitar was a piece of wood and two strings attached with his mother's hairpins. He pumped gas and worked as a custodian before stepping on a train early one morning of his 21st year and stepping off at midnight in Chicago. Soon he was getting by on Muddy Waters' salami sandwiches and battling on stage with guitar greats-to-be.

Guy is 72 now and still growling and smiling. In Columbia he sang the title song for his new CD, "Skin Deep." It's a soulful plea for understanding instead of racism, for accepting instead of judging. "Underneath we all are the same," reassures the old bluesman, sounding like someone cut deep enough to know.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.