The Blues & Billie Armstrong 66
BLUE INTERLUDE
Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
I laid the newspaper down next to my drink on the side table, and I buried my face in my hands. “I should have known,” I said out loud to no one. Turned my face up to the ceiling, laughed at the muddy convoluted truth.
There’s an old blues tune called Sufferin’ Mind, written and recorded by a New Orleans player named Eddie Lee Jones, who went by the stage name Guitar Slim.
He had a few big hits in the early 1950’s, but a short career. Some folks live life at a faster tempo and Guitar Slim drank his way to a Louisiana cemetery before his thirty-third birthday.
He was an innovator who pioneered the use of amplifier distortion and influenced later rock-n-roll greats like Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Legend has it that he was one helluva showman, known to dye his hair with wild bright colors to match his equally wild suits. They say he turned every knob up to ten and used a guitar cord that was hundreds of feet long so he could walk out the front door of the club and play in the street for the moving, honking world. Unfortunately, not a single piece of video and only a few photographs exist of him today.
So, Guitar Slim isn’t one of the bluesmen best remembered by the public, but he left these words that many bluesmen do remember.
So, if I have any wisdom… you know that you will find
that life means nothing to you when you have a worried mind
So forgive me for what I do… cuz’ I just live on with a sufferin’ mind
The blues is the foundational truth of American Music.
It’s the trunk of the tree that grew from the roots of Africa, Appalachia and the fields and churches and juke joints of the South, and seeded everything else from country and rock-n-roll to jazz and hip hop. From the Mississippi Delta to Memphis and New Orleans. Up to St. Louis and Chicago, down to Texas and out to the West Coast. And finally to Lupoyoma County in the luggage of a Black soldier named Watkins.
Another American songwriter, Michael Franks, wrote a song called White Boy Lost in the Blues to express his own love for the form. That song’s success over the years testifies to the wider truth of its title. It rings all the way home for me. I was a thirteen-year-old white boy in a drowsing backroads town in 1970 Northern California. The blues hit me like a slap upside the heart—an instantaneous love at first twang that felt taboo, unearned, illicit, and yet exhilarating and undeniable.
I’m not trying to pawn myself off as an expert. I haven’t read everything ever written on the music or the history, or heard every record ever made. I’m not well-versed in whatever the academic scholars think they know about the blues. I don’t claim to know fatdoodleysquat about what the music means to anyone else. I know what it means to me. I know I’ve been lost in the blues since the day Billie Armstrong opened up a hatbox full of my mother’s secrets, fired up the Grundig, and dropped the needle on the Howlin’ Wolf.
Down the many years since that moment, I’ve played at playing the blues, on harmonica and guitar, and still I have no idea how to play any song, any progression, or even any single lick just exactly right. And I think that’s how it has to be. Because in the blues there’s no such thing as just exactly right. In the blues, cleanliness is not next to godliness. It’s not even on the same street. All you need are three chords and a scar on your heart. Beyond that, it’s your holler. The blues is ragged-right like this column of type. Like a serrated knife that’ll cut ya bone deep. Don’t worry too much about what it means. Just make it feel.
“For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.” — James Baldwin, from the short story, Sonny's Blues.
Tell em your heart. That’s all it means.
The Blues & Billie Armstrong is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance of the fictional characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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