Those boogie-woogie blues

Sitting at his tidy, well-lit kitchen table, Rip Lee Pryor seems little more than the consummate neighbor. He drives a small SUV. He talks about the heat. This particular Monday, he's building a water feature in the backyard of his Carbondale, Illinois, home.

Not much about him suggests he's one of the foremost blues musicians in Southern Illinois.

"I fish. I'm retired, you know? I find little odds and ends to do about the house," he says. "I play a little bit of music."

In the next room, though, there's a floor-to-ceiling glass case full of antique harmonicas and half-a-dozen iterations of classic microphones, some of which his father used.

Because Rip Lee, 58, happens to be the son of Chicago-blues heavy Snooky Pryor, whose harmonicas littered the house when Rip Lee was growing up.

Blues musician Rip Lee Pryor poses for a photo Monday inside his Carbondale, Illinois, home.Laura Simon

That's where he learned how to blow a harp and what music can really do, from the thigh-slapping boogie-woogie blues that makes people hop to the straining, delta-heat-wave stuff that makes 'em sweat and curse.

Sure, he can play some, he says, grabbing a D-key harmonica. That's the best key for him to sing in, he explains.

The only warm-up he takes is the high-pitched false start of an upside-down harp.

By the time he flips it right, it's sliding in, teasing out a jittery, feverish honk. His left hand cups the instrument, with his right fluttering behind to make it cry.

He seems invigorated by the kinetic energy of a blues progression. His feet tap. His shoulders sway a little. Right at the kitchen table, he's got his mojo workin'.

It's the groove. The groove and the timeless musical inertia that kicks it from the five chord back to the one when he hits the turnaround.

He usually plays with a guitar, too; he's a bare bones performer you could sit right next to on a porch.

Pryor toured internationally with his one-man show years ago, but settled down and got a day job as a carpenter. Then he retired. Then he got bone marrow cancer.

"I did two years of just gamblin'," he recalls flatly. "Didn't know whether I was gonna live or die."

But after a while, it also brought him a sort of clarity.

"If I can get up from the cancer," he remembers telling himself, "I'm gonna play my music."

His white-stubbled cheeks puff and shudder as he plays, and his eyebrows jump and furrow. He's pouring vitality into each florid verse. But there's a weight to it, his music. It looks like hard work.

He got up from the cancer and did tours in the Netherlands and Brazil while taking chemotherapy. The cancer went away, came back and went away again. And Pryor keeps on playing.

He sings in a clear and smooth voice, only adding a touch of grit here and there for a throaty, wounded edge.

"I guess you stuck on stupid," he moans between riffs. "Look like stupid stuck on you."

A good harmonica player, he says, is one who "pulls the keys in the right key at the right time."

"To me, I could listen to three notes and figure out if he could play," he says. "And there's a lot of good harmonica players out there. A lot."

And he's met many. The best thing about touring, he says, are the people. On YouTube, there are videos of him playing in a sparse, European living room to a gaggle of Dutch blues fans seated right down on the floor in front of him.

He's not hopping continents any time soon, he says. He doesn't play locally like he used to. But he will have a date in Marion, Illinois, at the end of the month if all goes well.

"I just try to do the best I can and try to perfect what I do all the time," he says, before adding with inimitable bluesman pith: "Right now, it's like I'm in it deep."

tgraef@semissourian.com

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