New Orleans

1991, age 19.  "West End Blues," by Louis Armstrong. 

I'm writing this entry from the greatest musical city on earth: New Orleans, Louisiana. I've visited a lot of places that can justly claim to be musical meccas - Austin, Chicago, New York, Nashville, Memphis - but New Orleans has them all beat. She has the most unique musical history of any city on earth and has nurtured multiple styles. Of course, everyone associates NOLA with jazz, which is true enough. The style's earliest progenitors came exclusively from the Big Easy, so much so that jazz (or 'jass') was regarded as almost a folk style. Names like Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory, Sidney Bechet, and King Oliver are still revered here. And then there's Louis Armstrong. Pops is still regarded as more of a demi-god in the city than an historical figure, a musical Hercules and Prometheus rolled into one. Even the first white people to steal the style and record it as their own came from New Orleans. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded a somewhat cornier version of the music and carried it north and east to usher in the Jazz Age.

Jazz looms so large in the city's history that outsiders sometimes forget that the city could boast enormous musical importance even without it:

• The first opera house in the Western hemisphere was located in the French colony. Native composer Louis Gottschalk was one of the first classical musicians to use "world music" influences in his writing, incorporating the Caribbean rhythms he heard brought through the city's port.
• Congo Square, now located in Louis Armstrong park, is the spiritual home of West African drumming in the United States, the only place in the American South where slaves could play the music of their ancestors.
• Brass bands proliferated in the years following the Civil War, spurred on by Patrick Gilmore's "Peace Jubilee" staged here in 1865. Bands can be found at funerals, in clubs, and marching in the ubiquitous parades.
• Ragtime, an essential ingredient in jazz, was enormously popular at the turn of the 20th century, and much of what we know about how that style was improvised comes from recordings of New Orleans' musicians.
• The city's churches have always rung with powerful singing, and the Queen of Gospel, Mahalia Jackson, was born in the Carrollton neighborhood.
• Just downriver from the Mississippi Delta, blues has always thrived in New Orleans. From early pioneers like Lonnie Johnson to Snooks Eaglin to Little Freddie King, the city is on par with Memphis, Clarksdale, and Chicago.
• The Crescent City was the home to some of the most influential pioneers in rhythm and blues and later rock and roll: Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, and Huey "Piano" Smith. And although Little Richard hailed from Georgia, his playing bears the city's influence, most of it recorded here in Cosimo Matassa's studio with band members from New Orleans.
• From such a stanky atmosphere, it is no surprise that New Orleans can claim so many funk pioneers, like Dr. John and the Meters, along with legendary producer, Allen Toussaint. The word "funk" may even originate in New Orleans. The sole remaining evidence of legendary ragtime/jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden is a song called "Funky Butt Blues," dating from the turn of the last century.
• Rappers like Lil Wayne and Juvenile call New Orleans home and there is even a unique style of local hip-hop called bounce.
• Although Cajun and Zydeco both hail from the countryside around the city, it's easy enough to find live musicians playing both any night of the week.

Throw in healthy (though smaller) doses of country and bluegrass, and one need not travel outside the city to see the full range of American musical expression.

I remember learning about New Orleans from a college music history professor. He told us about Congo Square and "Creoles of Color." We learned how the geography of the city, along with its unique political history, helped fashion the musical landscape. I discovered why the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson may have directly influenced the birth of jazz. I especially remember listening to Jelly Roll Morton talking about "ragging the rhythm" of Sousa marches, and hearing Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" for the first time. Armstrong knew the West End well. Canal Street separated the English-speaking black neighborhoods of the West End from the French-speaking Creole neighborhoods of the French Quarter. The opening cadenza of "West End Blues" has 200 years of history in it. It's brilliant and vibrant and 90 years after it was recorded, it still sounds fresh.

As much as I travel, I had never been to New Orleans until just a few years ago. My wife and I decided that we would make our first trip over Thanksgiving 2005. Then Katrina hit and our plans were canceled.

In spring of 2008 I decided to do a school concert themed around the music of New Orleans. We included as many styles as we could to give a cross-section of the city's musical heritage: African drumming, gospel, blues, opera, Cajun, rock and roll, funk, etc. My friend Steve even arranged Professor Longhair's "Mardi Gras in New Orleans" for my band and choir. It was pretty solid. To this day, I think it's my favorite concert I've done with students.

I decided that if I were going to teach about the music of New Orleans, I needed to experience it myself, and so we planned a trip down during spring break.

The place exceeded my wildest expectations.

There is music everywhere. Where I am staying right now, on Frenchmen Street, it is impossible to not hear live music in the evening. That's not hyperbole. This one tiny lane has over a dozen live music venues in a two-block radius, some of them with multiple stages. And that's not counting the "biker bard" who sings Sam Cooke songs, or the ragged white kids playing old-time music or gypsy jazz on the sidewalk.

The city acknowledges and celebrates its musical heritage. The airport is Louis Armstrong International. There are dozens of festivals - Jazz Fest, French Quarter Festival, Voodoo Festival, etc. - all with live music around the clock. And although the city is passionate about the home team, one senses that the Saints are named after the song, rather than their birth on All Saints' Day, as the official story goes.

That first trip led to some pretty wonderful personal discoveries. I heard the Rebirth Brass Band and the Soul Rebels, and learned that the New Orleans tradition was really alive, still incorporating new influences like hip-hop and reggae. This wasn't Wynton Marsalis. This was music that people wanted to dance to. I heard Walter "Wolfman" Washington and Washboard Chaz and swing bands where all the members were tattooed Gen Y-ers.

I also made my first visit to the Louisiana Music Factory, one of the few remaining great independent record stores. There I was introduced to Galactic and Dumpstafunk and the Zion Harmonizers. And then I found out about WWOZ, 90.7, a local radio station where DJs still spin records they want to hear instead of those that marketing reports tell them to.

I was hooked. That one trip in April of 2008 led to another in July. Then another and another and another. I'd have to get out some old calendars to figure it out, but this trip is our 8th or 9th in those few years.

To me, New Orleans represents everything that is great about America. It's a city with a dirty, complex history, where slave-traders and voodoo queens and cross-dressers and pimps and musicians all rubbed elbows. It's a place where people can reinvent themselves, where at least once a year, at Carnival, you get to dress any way you like and "do watcha wanna." It's a place where the grandson of a slave can leave reform school with a cornet and become the most famous American icon of the 20th century.

With all of this incredible music history, the school system obviously places a high value on music education, right? And of course this history is taught by music teachers to every student in the state. Well, not exactly.

In both my regular day job and as president of our state's music educators association, I get the chance to meet arts educators and leaders from around the country. Every time I meet a music teacher from Louisiana, I get excited. I tell them about my love for the music of New Orleans and who I saw on my last trip and how I can't wait to get back there. And almost every time I have had this conversation, I get a blank stare. They seem essentially unaware of the culture I am describing. They've heard of Louis Armstrong and Wynton Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr. But they don't know the Rebirth Brass Band or the Soul Rebels. They don't know Glen David Andrews or Corey Henry or Trombone Shorty. They don't know Irma Thomas or Lloyd Price or Lee Dorsey. And they don't listen to bounce.

What's going on here?

What they talk about, what they do know, is all the same school music that everyone else is wallowing in. They are familiar with the new publication from Paul Lavender or Jay Bocook. They can tell you what they thought of the new Kirby Shaw or Roger Emerson arrangements. They can discuss what David Holsinger selections were most popular at festival this year.

If you don't know those names, there is a simple reason: you aren't a music teacher. These are the "superstars" of school music, but they are virtually unknown outside of that world. Yet Louisiana students probably learn more music of a staff arranger for Hal Leonard than the music in their own back yard.

At a meeting in Atlanta a couple of years ago, I was talking to a music educator from Baton Rouge and told him that I had opened a concert with a quasi-jazz funeral, my kids improvising with "Just a Closer Walk" and "Saints." They learned it by listening to recordings of groups like the Magnificent Seventh's Brass Band and played it by ear. He told me his band had played the Jared Spears arrangement, "At a Dixieland Jazz Funeral." Dr. Spears lives in Arkansas. He complained that his students wanted to play hip-hop and sound like Grambling State, rather than the drum corps he obviously loved.

This is not quite a case of a prophet having no honor in his own country. New Orleans musicians are widely revered. Just not by music educators. And not in school.

School music programs vary widely across the state, but the public schools in New Orleans, many would agree, are among the worst in the nation. Newspaper articles often report the renaissance of school music programs, but the truth is that most are surviving largely through charitable work done by foundations like Tipitina's and Mr. Holland's Opus. One charity, MusicianCorps, places music teachers in New Orleans schools at no cost to the school system. At the Monday show at d.b.a. this week, Glen David Andrews announced his goal of providing 500 musical instruments this year to New Orleans youth through his foundation, Trumpets Not Guns. While these are certainly laudable efforts, one wonders why the school system doesn't hire music teachers and purchase instruments for its students. Catholic schools in the city fare somewhat better, and many families who love music send their children to these. The famous "Marching 100" at St. Augustine still parades at Mardi Gras, though even they are down to about 90.

In case you haven't picked up on it, the elephant in the band room is race. The poorest (read: "blackest") schools in urban (read: "black") neighborhoods have almost no support for their music programs, in spite of the fact that music is historically one of the city's most important industries. And many music educators place a higher value on traditional (read: "white") musical styles than popular (read: "black") styles.

In this way, New Orleans simply reflects our culture at large. Our music history in this country is largely the product of our attitudes about race. Styles that are most associated with the African-American community (and these are almost all of them in their earliest phases) are initially viewed by the dominant white culture as vulgar, barbaric, and even non-musical. This was true of minstrelsy, blues, jazz, R&B, and rock & roll. It's still true of hip-hop. Elaborate explanations are offered about the supposed quality of the music and its effect on "youth" (read: "white kids"). I have an aunt who used to refer to rock as "jungle music," revealing more latent racism than she probably intended. The truth is that if "jungle" refers to "Africa" (as it did in Duke Ellington's music), then all American music is "jungle music" to some extent. The musical materials of West Africa run deep in our culture.

Over time, those attitudes toward a musical style soften and become part of the mainstream culture. A genre is legitimized in our culture when it is accepted by white people. There are white brass bands in New Orleans, but they are playing music that sounds 100 years old.

For better or worse, music educators largely reflect these dominant cultural attitudes. Most music teachers are not overtly racist, but they do not generally question the assumptions they have inherited. My friend in Louisiana complained about the "poor tone quality" of marching bands like Southern University. The truth is, white music teachers were making the same complaints about jazz musicians in the 1920s. I heard a prominent national music educator tell a crowd that he had taught his own children to dislike the sound of the drum machine. While most musicians probably prefer a live drummer, the prominent sound of the "808" in rap is probably what he had in mind. And it is common to hear vocal teachers decry the "incorrect" and "damaging" technique of blues, gospel and soul singers, in spite of the lengthy career of Aretha Franklin and others. (Before anyone begins using Adele as an example, I would like to point out that she is a smoker, which is far more likely to damage the vocal apparatus than singing. I have heard so many claims on this particular issue that just sound like nonsense to me. While I certainly believe that the voice can be damaged, very few vocal injuries are permanent and most come from simple overuse - a danger any professional singer faces, regardless of the style.)

I believe it's time for music educators to move forward on this issue. School should be a place where all styles of music are studied, especially those that are prominent in the culture at large. While it is certainly laudable to extend our students' musical experiences, I would question whether over-exposure to a small handful of composers who solely serve an educational market accomplishes that. While the conversation is often framed in terms of "Mozart versus Jay-Z," the truth is that most school music teachers are pitting James Swearingen against Jay-Z. I'd pick Hova in that fight.

In the end, it's just a question of how relevant we are as a profession. Professor Peter Davis, the music teacher at the New Orleans Home for Colored Waifs, can be celebrated mainly for allowing young Louis Armstrong to discover his own creative potential. That should be the goal of any educator.

New Music

2011, Age 39. "Between Two Lungs," by Florence + The Machine, from Lungs.

For a couple of years I got to teach a class on the history of American popular music to high school students. It was a lot of fun because I was able to design a curriculum (while still addressing standards, lest you education folk be concerned) around something I am passionate about. I also had that wonderful experience as a teacher of feeling as if I were learning almost as much as my students. I certainly wasn't ignorant of the topic when I began, but my understanding is much deeper now.

There were several "big ideas" in the course, threads that ran through virtually every topic. One was that American music is unique because it is largely the product of two very strongly musical cultures - from West Africa and the British Isles - intersecting on unequal terms and in sometimes violent ways. The blues becomes the archetype for this convergence, and the basis for everything that follows. Another big idea relates to the way new musical ideas become a part of the culture. The script goes something like this:

A younger generation of musicians grows up in the musical tradition of their predecessors, learning the basic materials of the genre. Then something in the culture at large - technology, market forces, political realities - intersects the lives of these young artists, and the music is transformed. The new style is not entirely original, but it is perceived as such. The older generation rejects the new music, believes it to be inferior or perhaps even threatening to conventional values. Over time, the new style is accepted and the younger generation grows up. A new generation begins to learn the music of the generation that preceded it and the whole process starts all over.

Now this is true to a degree of virtually all art at all times all over the world, but it seems to be more true of American music, beginning perhaps in the 20th century. John Philip Sousa said that the new jazz music "makes you want to bite your grandmother." Cab Calloway pejoratively referred to bebop as "Chinese music." Sinatra said that Elvis' music "fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people." Nina Simone thought that rap wasn't even music. And so on. These reactions have become so predictable, in fact, that when you look at the history of popular music as a whole, it begins to get a little dull.

It is not lost on me that this second big idea is closely related to the first one. Speaking in generalizations, you can almost divide American music into music black folks listen to, and music black folks used to listen to. As the dominant white music establishment begins to accept styles that have their roots (for the most part) in African-American culture, that culture moves on to something else. A topic for another day, perhaps.

Music education tends to mirror these historical trends and behaviors. Time was, you couldn't even study jazz at colleges in the United States. Now we have entire schools dedicated to jazz and rock music. To a point. Those styles that are in the ascendancy of youth culture are largely ignored. As Lady Gaga asked rhetorically, when questioned about dropping out of school, "What could they have taught me about 'Disco Stick' in college?"

If you speak to music teachers, you will notice that their attitudes tend to reflect these generational biases. Many seem to believe that the last truly legitimate musical expression happened in their youth, usually when they were in high school or college. Some continue following the new releases of the idols of their adolescence, but it is rare to meet a music teacher who is actively listening to the music his students favor. A few even express bewilderment that 14-year-olds don't share their tastes. I remember one middle-aged music teacher bemoaning the fact that none of her high school students had heard of Kansas. (I should point out that this was in the pre-Guitar Hero era.) I'm not sure why Kansas should represent the acme of musical expression in this teacher's mind, but whatever.

For me, this gets to the heart of why there is so much passionless music teaching going on in our schools. I would guess that many have forgotten what it is like to really love music. Do you remember what it was like, that first time, or maybe the first dozen times, when it felt like a song you were listening to, or singing, or playing was the best thing you could ever feel? For those of us who chose this as a career, this was followed by several years of music school, then a few more years of the daily grind, trying to get 12-year-olds to remember the fingering for A-natural concert. If we aren't careful, we forget why we decided to do this in the first place. The truth is, it's rare to find music teachers who are still players. To many of them, the sheer joy of music-making and music-listening is something that belongs to their youth.

This certainly isn't true of everyone. The best music teachers I know still play music regularly and when you see them, they ask, "Have you heard . . . ?" I love talking to these people. My friend Rachel is one of the best music teachers I know. She also lives in the small town of New Haven, West Virginia, so she's the de facto maestra of Mason County. She directs the church musical. She accompanies singers on piano. She plays bluegrass bass. She occasionally sits in with a local jazz group on trombone. Et cetera. She also loves listening to music. She's the one who hipped me to Florence + The Machine. We were working together on a project and she kept saying, "You gotta check out this song."

I like this whole album. Florence Welch is one of those big-voiced rock anthem singers like Bono or Steve Perry, which is not to say she can't use her voice in other ways (check out the smarmy "Girl with One Eye"). Yet she seems most at home at forte or louder, belting it out like she's alone in her car going fast down an open highway. In fact, most of these songs make me want to get in my car and drive - anywhere - but fast, and singing at the top of my lungs.

"Between Two Lungs" is the perfect song for doing this. The instruments are boomy and full of echo, Florence is belting in full chest voice at the upper end of her alto range. It might be a love song, I'm not sure, but it's the song I'm falling in love with at the moment. Whatever it's about, it's bursting Flo's lungs to sing about it:

Gone are all the days of begging, the days of theft,

No more gasping for a breath.
The air filled me head to toe
And I can see the ground far below.
I have this breath and I hold it tight
And I keep it in my chest with all my might.
I pray to God this breath will last
As it pushes past my lips as I . . . dance!
This record probably won't change my life. It doesn't matter. Being able to wake up every day and hear something new makes getting out of bed worthwhile.

I've written several times about the transcendent power that music has, that it can transport you to another time or place, or make you feel like a different person. New music is almost a fountain of youth. This is so true, in fact, that when the apostle John wants to describe heaven, he says that it is a place where new songs are sung, a place where tears will be wiped away forever, where there is no more dying. I don't know what I think about that anymore, but I do know that when I feel like wiping my tears away and living forever, I can think of nothing better to do than ask someone, "Have you heard anything good lately?"

Soul

2011, Age 39. "Fuck You," by Cee-Lo Green, from The Ladykiller.

I probably see more live music than the average person. I tried to make a list one day, but that was an almost impossible task. I came back to the list the next day because I had forgotten to put Sonny Rollins on it. When you start forgetting that you've seen Newk live, you know you've seen a few shows.

My summer has been bookended by a couple of concerts that will stay with me, but for different reasons. The first was Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings at the Clay Center here in Charleston. The second was Cee-Lo Green, a show I've just returned from, in Huntington. The two shows are noteworthy for how incredibly different they were.

I should say that I'm writing just this moment because I'm a little angry. Or maybe I'm trying to cope. I don't know. Actually, I think I'm confused more than anything else.

Let me preface by saying that I'm a big Cee-Lo fan. I thought that St. Elsewhere was the best pop album of 2006. "Crazy" is one of my favorite songs and I've referred to it elsewhere. And "Fuck You" is undoubtedly one of the catchiest tunes out this past year, one I find myself singing full-voiced at entirely inappropriate times. Did you catch him on the Grammys? The dude played the song with the muppets. How cool is that?

I've had a really busy day and I've got a packed work schedule all weekend, so I was a little worried about coming home late. But it didn't matter because I was excited. Live music, baby!

Here's the short version:

We arrive about 15 minutes before show time, grab a couple of beers and have a seat. The concert was part of the Marshall (University) Artist Series, so they had a bunch of announcements about the series, the underwriters and all that jazz. The show starts about 7:12. Cee-Lo comes out with a chick band, all wearing Marshall University gear, skating shorts and pig tails. All except the drummer were faking. Or at least, they weren't playing the music that was coming from the speakers. Cee-Lo sings - "Bright Lights and the Big City," "Fuck You," "Crazy," a couple of new ones, covers of "Rock the Casbah" and "Don't You Wish Your Boyfriend Was Hot Like Me" - then calls it a night. "Thank you, you've been a great audience." The clock said 7:42.

It was still daylight when we left the arena and I just couldn't stop thinking about the contrast between these two concerts.

When I saw Sharon Jones, she was following Percy Sledge. Most of the audience came to see Percy and several left before she even took the stage. Almost no one in the audience knew who she was. Cee-Lo had no opening act and everyone was there to see him, a celebrity. Cee-Lo, nominated for four Grammys, brought backing tracks and a fake rhythm section. Sharon is probably not rolling in cash, but brought a 12-piece band with horns and back-up singers. Cee-Lo phoned it in and quit after about 30 minutes. Sharon quit after about three hours and the energy never dropped.

What accounts for the difference? I'm not sure, except that I can tell you Sharon Jones has soul. That's why we go hear music. Yeah, we care about chops and celebrity may get you through the door, but at the end of the day, it's all about soul. We go into a concert wanting to see something special. We want to leave knowing that the performer has left herself on that stage. We want the blood, sweat and tears. We want to know that they need us as bad as we need them.

I remember being worried at the beginning of the Dap Kings concert. The audience was slow to catch on. They'd just sat through 90 minutes of an R&B legend on a Thursday night and didn't know who this short little 55-year-old woman was when she took the stage. But she brought it from the first downbeat. They played medleys of dances from the 60s and she demonstrated every one: the watusi, the mashed potato, the funky broadway, the funky chicken, the boogaloo and the rest. She courted the audience. She seduced and teased and told those funny stories soul singers do about their no-good men and their trifling ways. And she sang. Dear God, did she sing.

It was her first time in West Virginia. Who knows what she thought when she got started. What she probably thought was, "I'm gonna have to work this crowd." She did work us. We were out of our chairs, clapping, singing, shaking a tail-feather. We danced until we had to sit down for a minute, but Sharon just kept going. She worked the band like James Brown. Actually, she seemed like no one so much as the Godfather himself and I remember thinking, "She's the hardest working woman in show business."

She had something to say and she knew that we would want to hear it. She knew her songs would mean something to us because they meant something to her. She believed in them, and knew we could relate to the fundamental humanity in her music. When she finally walked off the stage after the final encore, you knew you had seen everything she was, laid bare. That's soul.

Cee-Lo knew the crowd was there to see someone famous. He wore a Marshall track suit and told the audience they had a lot of "energy." He was even clever enough to play on the recent disappointments of the Herd faithful by dedicating "Fuck You" to West Virginia University. But honestly, he could just as easily have dedicated it to all us suckers dumb enough to shell out the paper for his show.

I've seen some good shows in my life, sometimes in unexpected places. I've seen Glenn David Andrews play to a room of 25 like it's the Superdome. I've seen Beyonce play the Superdome like she needed the cash. (She brought an all-chick band, too, but you better believe none of them were faking it.) I've seen Glenn David's cousin, Trombone Shorty, playing the auditorium at West Virginia State like it was Treme on St. Joseph's Day. I've seen Tower of Power playing a run-down casino that smelled like ash trays and bring the whole place down. I've seen 68-year-old Fred Wesley passing the peas at an Irish bar in Chicago and 95-year-old Pinetop Perkins doing his boogie at Antone's in Austin. I've heard Ginny Hawker, seated alone on stage at Glenville State College, singing the most bone-chilling Primitive Baptist hymns you can imagine. And I've heard The Del McCoury Band at Carnegie Hall (the little one) in Lewisburg, and they were so high and lonesome it could make an Episcopalian handle snakes.

They all had soul. They all had that thing . . . that thing about music that makes us come back again and again and again.

Let me tell you some other places I've heard it.

I've heard it listening to a group of teenagers on a football field on a Friday night. I've heard it at a 7:30 AM choir practice. I've heard it in the middle of a rehearsal when eight or nine high school students decide they own a tune they've heard Cannonball or Miles play, and suddenly realize they have something to say that's worth hearing.

They all had soul, too.

The concert tonight has me confused, but it also has me angry. There were several hundred 18 and 19-year-olds there, some probably seeing a rock concert for the first time. They were probably excited, probably thought about what they should wear, wondered about seeing their first big superstar. Now they've left the arena not knowing the pure, electric joy that live music can bring.

Maybe Cee-Lo just didn't think a bunch of West Virginia college kids deserved that type of soul. You know what I say to that? "Fuck you."

My Tears Dry on Their Own

2011, Age 39. "Back to Black," by Amy Winehouse, from the album of the same name.

It would probably be difficult to overstate my love for Amy Winehouse.

I first heard her thanks to a free download on iTunes. The song was "You Know I'm No Good." I was so taken aback by the record. I couldn't believe something this soulful, this melodic, this groovy was coming out in 2007. The production was good. There were horns. The sound was so warm, it sounded like vinyl. And then there was her voice.

She sounded to me like Ronnie Spector with a British accent, and I hadn't seen her picture yet. I bought the CD as soon as it was available. Then I went looking for her back catalog only to find that this was just her second record and that her first, Frank, wasn't available in the U.S. Ebay searches revealed that people were paying $35 or more for a copy. I lucked out and got a copy at a record store in Austin while visiting my friends, Steve and Michelle. I also bought the B-sides of both of those records. And downloaded her cover of "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" from iTunes. And several acoustic/alternate versions of songs.

I read cover stories about her in Rolling Stone and Mojo. I watched a Biography special about her. I played her records in my class. I played her for others, like my friend Kenya, until they were hooked, too. I accompanied one of my students singing "Love is a Losing Game" at our jazz cafe at school. I was a fan. I have even blogged about her previously.

Like all of her fans, I followed her tumultuous personal life through the media. It saddened me, but somehow I knew that this was part-and-parcel of her art, too.

I know there are those who reject this sort of thinking and are even angered by it. I will also add that I don't wish to romanticize her addictions and depression, nor suggest that these should be imitated by those hoping to achieve greatness. But you can hear it in her voice. There is very real pain coming through every note of that album. When people talk about soul, I think that is what they are hearing. It may not be necessary to be going through emotional turmoil while singing, but having that deep psychic well to draw from is an unquestionable artistic advantage.

This seems self-evident to me, however politically incorrect it is. Charlie Parker's genius, while perhaps not reliant on his turbulent inner life, was undoubtedly facilitated by it. I've heard countless musicians say, "Imagine what Bird might have done if he weren't on heroin," but the truth is, we don't know. While there have been many notable exceptions, one cannot look at music history without being struck by the many instances of depression and substance abuse.

I'm reading a good book right now called Touched by Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison. It's about instances of manic depression among artists and why bi-polar disorder seems to be such a frequent occurrence among that group. Jamison speculates that the emotional sensitivity that accompanies depression in its various forms is of real value to the artist. If there is also an attendant mania, the artist is able to tap into both the dark and light sides of her nature and work feverishly at times to produce works of exceptional beauty and power. To return to Bird as an example, it seems unthinkable that his legendary 16-hour practice days might have happened apart from a real mania.

Jamison also discusses the tendency of those who live with manic-depression to violate social mores and live on the edge of the culture. We love rock stars for this. When Cee-Lo sings, "My heroes had the heart to live their lives out on the limb," he is echoing something many of us feel. They take risks that many of us can't or won't. We secretly envy so much of their outrageous behavior and wonder if meeting Old Nick down by the crossroads might really be worth it after all. Drunken nights of debauchery and lost years are the stuff of rock legend. Winehouse certainly had that going for her and a great rock image to boot, covered in tattoos, beehive hairdo, cat-eye make-up and playing guitar.

I've speculated for some time about the issue of substance abuse among artists and I think that it is an under-discussed topic. Suggesting that it's only a physiological issue ignores what many of us know first hand. Creating art, especially performing, requires the artist to bring something deeply personal to the surface for everyone to see. This doesn't seem so hard when you are 17 and full of piss. But as you get older, your internal dialog begins to disrupt you, first saying things like, "Don't forget to use the forked F-sharp fingering in this passage." Then he grows more malevolent: "Everyone is embarrassed for you. They feel sorry for you. You should stop playing." Drinking makes that inner man shut up and lets you connect to your performance the way you used to, back when you were cocksure and the world was your oyster.

Apart from that, it's probably the way a lot of artists deal with depression. Amy Winehouse was famous for her alcoholism, but as she said, “I’m manic depressive. I’m not an alcoholic, which sounds like an alcoholic in denial.” You can hear this in her songwriting. "I don't ever wanna drink again, ooh, I just need a friend," she moans in "Rehab," the most notorious song from the album. But the album is thick with this insight into a very painful existence.

Her knowing self-deprecation in "You Know I'm No Good," is alluring as it is distressing to hear, the cheater rather than the cheated begging for a lover to stay, without asking or expecting forgiveness. "Love is a Losing Game" is at turns crass ("Five-story fire as you came") and grandiose ("Over futile odds and laughed at by the gods"). (This one has been my favorite for the last couple of years. Go look for the version with just Amy singing to Fender Rhodes accompaniment. As delightful as Mark Ronson's production is, with its Spectorish wall of sound throughout, this version is perfect and stripped to essentials.) "Tears Dry on Their Own" begins with arguably the best lyric on the album: "All I can ever be to you is the darkness that we knew, and this regret I got accustomed to."

It would be difficult to explain why I identify so closely with these songs. There are certainly elements in the songs that speak to my experience, though not many (although I always smile when she sings to her would-be rehabilitators, "There is nothing you can teach me that I can't learn from Mr. Hathaway.") When I'm going through my own "black" times, I listen to her album a lot.

It just so happens that I've been listening to it a lot this summer, for reasons that I won't go into here. I was eating lunch in Morgantown when I heard she was dead.

I almost wrote, "when I heard that she died," but that makes it sound like something that happened to her. Her death was certainly at her own hand, in one fashion or another. It struck me very hard, but of course, I was not surprised.

My grief at her death is two-fold. I'll go ahead and confess that it was, at first, a selfish grief. I was so upset that we would be hearing no more from this voice. I had been waiting anxiously for her next record and now it wasn't coming. The disease that gave her to us turned and killed her, just as it had other members of the "27 Club," along with Bird and Donny Hathaway, too.

Then I just grieved for her and what her life must have been. I know a bit about depression and have close friends who deal with it daily. Being a musician, it seems I know more than a handful, including many who have spent days and weeks crippled in a hospital, wrestling with their demons. And I've known a few, musicians and otherwise, who ended life at their own hands, whether intentionally or not. I felt like I understood something about what she went through and that type of emotional pain. I listened to her songs over and over again. And I cried. More than once.

Certainly there are more tragic deaths than Amy Winehouse's. I hope no one would infer than I find the death of a celebrity more heart-breaking than that of a soldier or any one of the thousands of children who die senselessly in our world every day due to war or hunger. But her death resonated with me particularly because it seemed itself representative of the pain of this life. I cried for her because she was able to express that for so many of us. As she sang in the title song from Back to Black, "I died a hundred times." Maybe this last time will be enough.

Drink Your Big Black Cow and Get Out of Here

1990, Age 18. "Deacon Blues," from Aja, by Steely Dan.

My friend Noelle hates Steely Dan. I just learned this yesterday.

"The Dan" are one of those acts I have been waiting to hear in concert for years. They have never played West Virginia and I found out last May that they were playing at the Clay Center - literally within walking distance from my house. Exciting stuff.

I've been a fan since I was 18. This was some years after they were popular, of course, as kings of the FM dial. I knew a few of their songs, maybe, but had never really paid attention to them until my freshman year of college.

I was a saxophone major in a studio that was incredibly talented and pretty tight. Our freshman class was good, but we were in awe of the upper classmen. They had serious chops. Scott Gumina. Bob Maxon. Scott Brockmeyer. Marty Ojeda. These dudes were serious bad-asses in our opinion.

We practiced all the time. If you went into the bowels of the CAC anytime, day or night, you could hear saxophones. Scales. Patterns. Ferling etudes. Bach suites. French recital pieces. Mouthpiece exercises. The Omnibook. Transcriptions of Coltrane, Dexter, Sonny Rollins. New music. Lots of new music, some of it too weird for other studios, but we played it all.

And these dudes had ears. Ears like you wouldn't believe. You could play drop the needle and they'd tell you in three seconds if were Bird or Sonny Stitt. Hell, they could tell you if it were Marcel Mule or Sigurd Rascher. They were some obscure motherfuckers. Bob Maxon had perfect pitch, the first person I ever met who did, but they could all hear. They taught me how to listen.

They taught me a lot actually. I once asked Scott Brockmeyer what his practice routine was and he said, "First, I get a case of beer. Then I go up in my room and get out my horn. Then I practice and drink and when I can't feel my fingers, I stop." Good ol' Brock.

Listening was a big deal. You were expected to listen twice as much as you practiced and you were expected to practice a lot. Thursday night was masterclass with David Hastings and Curtis Johnson, our professors, and still two of the most incredible teachers and musicians I have ever met. Unlike other masterclasses, ours weren't always about critiquing other players. Some nights, Hastings would come in with some book he was reading about art or education or something and just read passages to us and ask us what we thought. Some nights, we'd just listen to music. Those nights were the best.

After masterclass, some players would stay and practice. Sometimes there'd be a recital to attend or maybe someone had a gig downtown. Or, we'd just head to someone's apartment and put on records and listen for hours. I was introduced to some great music on those nights. Coltrane's My Favorite Things. Tenor Madness. The Brecker Brothers' Heavy Metal Bebop. Anthony Braxton playing all kinds of out shit. Ornette's Free Jazz. Wayne Shorter's JuJu.

They were some esoteric cats, too. They would do some out kind of things on occasion. At least, it seemed out to me at the time. In retrospect, I think they were just having fun.

One day in my first spring in Morgantown, I was down in a practice room playing tenor. I didn't have an alto yet. I was probably working on some Ferling etude at something like 1/4 speed, because I had crap technique compared to everyone else in studio. Then I hear someone banging on my door. It was Marty Ojeda.

Marty was a cool dude. He was also from Logan County, which I have to admit did not jive with my idea of a cool dude. In my mind, Logan County residents were hillbillies. The problem with my idea was that it didn't hold water when I met Marty. He had serious chops. And serious ears. He was first chair in the Wind Symphony and lead tenor in Jazz Ensemble I (I think. This was all some years ago.) He was a great player. He sounded like Lenny Pickett. I just learned who Lenny Pickett was that year. So, Marty was banging on my practice room door. I opened it.

"You wanna go fly a kite?"

" . . . what?"

"You wanna go fly a kite?"

"Uh. Sure. Let me put up my horn."

Now, this was not the type of invitation I was accustomed to getting. I don't think I had flown a kite since I was ten. But when a senior saxophone major asks you, a freshman saxophone major, if you want to go fly a kite, you accept. I thought it might be some sort of "Zen and the Art of Kite Flying"-type of exercise which might have applicability to my playing.

So, I put up my horn and got in Marty's car. We drove across the street to the Coliseum parking lot to fly our kites. I can't remember what kind of car he had, but I remember being duly unimpressed. He did have a cassette player. Steely Dan was playing.

"You like the Dan, man?"

"Who?"

"Steely Dan! You like Steely Dan?"

"I don't know who that is?"

"What?! You've never heard of Steely Dan? They did 'Reeling in the Years.'" He sang a few bars. I remembered that one. "They are musicians' musicians. All good musicians like Steely Dan."

That was enough for me. I took him at his word. I started buying Steely Dan records, which in 1990 was easy enough. It seemed that everyone was getting rid of their vinyl that year and everyone was getting rid of their Steely Dan. The first record I bought was Aja at the Princeton Record Exchange in New Jersey. I paid $1.00. Wayne Shorter plays on the record. Wayne Shorter, who played with Miles and co-founded Weather Report. I bought them all eventually. I own the entire SD discography and I can honestly say that I think every single record is great, even The Royal Scam.

I've learned over the years that not everyone likes Mssrs. Becker and Fagan. I remember some lame George Carlin bit about how he hated people who had "Baby on Board" stickers on their cars. "Are these the same people who listen to Steely Dan?" he asked. I never thought that asshole was funny.

They've been blamed for a lot, including inspiring young rock and rollers to invent punk music in protest to the slick production and complex harmonies evident on most SD records. No doubt about it: it's music for people who like to listen. I don't mean that as a criticism of anyone. I certainly don't mean that if you like to listen you must like Steely Dan. I just mean that they require some attention to really appreciate.

The music itself is the main thing. They riff on standard forms of course - Fagan and Becker had fantasies of being Brille Building tunesmiths. But they play with them. "Bodhisattva" sounds like it's going to be a 12-bar blues shuffle, but has this fun extended turn-around. Nothing too crazy. And a lot of the tunes push radio time limits. This was definitely a band for album-oriented rock, or rather album-oriented jazz-rock. The harmonies are fun for anyone who plays jazz. A little modal, some typical substitutions, the infamous "Mu major chord" (essentially an add 9 major triad voiced in a particular way).

The lyrics keep me coming back, too. I was probably listening for years before I even knew all the lyrics to one song. I once got into an argument with a friend who insisted that the refrain on "Hey Nineteen" went, "Look where they go, the fine tooth numbing-uh . . . " Honestly, with Steely Dan, I wouldn't be surprised if those were the lyrics. Songs about incest, pedophiles, porn, prostitutes, California drug kingpins, upper Manhattan cougars (before they were called that), alcoholics, Moonies and Charlie Parker. They favored the American underbelly for song topics, but what could you expect from a band named for a fictional dildo imagined by William Burroughs? You will not find, "I'm down on my knees, I'm beggin' you please," in the SD oeuvre.

I dig a lot of the songs. Some of them speak to me a lot more now that I'm older. Sometimes I like music that makes me feel young, but sometimes I like music that acknowledges that I have been around a bit. I've seen some things and not all of them are good. I'm even responsible for some of them. These are songs for losers and I can really dig that some days. "Deacon Blues" is easily my favorite:

They got a name for the winners in the world, I wanna name when I lose.

They call Alabama the Crimson tide . . . call me 'Deacon Blues.'

I connect a lot more to that music at 39 than I did at 18. Things are different. I'm more broken and more familiar with that dark side of life. Everyone I knew when I was 18 is different, too. David Hastings and Curtis Johnson have left WVU, just like all of us. Brock is dead. Marty Ojeda is back in Logan County, after spending years gigging in Nashville. He's a band director down there. He missed the concert last night, partly because he had band camp. And I'm . . . whatever I am.

I feel like that a lot these days. I did yesterday, thinking about going to the concert. I spent the day posting lyrics to my Facebook. Those lyrics bring out Dan-haters, and I know a lot of them. Noelle told me that Donald Fagen has no sense of humor and that having good players on your record does not make a band good. That's okay. Noelle is good people and a good musician, too. My friend John's wife tolerates all of his musical forerays (this is a man who is as likely to put on Burt Bacharach, the Louvin Brothers or Coltrane's Ascension), but will leave the room if he puts Steely Dan on the turntable.

Those lyrics bring out the SD fans, too. My friend Mark may be as big of a fan as I am. We've traded thoughts about the music and favorite lyrics. We even talked about getting together and writing some music a la Fagan and Becker one of these days. Maybe we will, if I ever learn to work the saxophone . . . play just what I feel . . .

My Desert Island Jukebox

1983, Age 11. "Overkill," by Men at Work, from Cargo.

I'm a regular listener to several music podcasts. One of my favorites is from Chicago Public Radio, Sound Opinions. The hosts, Jim DeRegotis and Greg Kot, write about pop music for the Chicago papers. Like most rock critics, they suffer from occasional pomposity and seem to favor a lot of tuneless indie rock (the type I wrote about here), but it's fun listening to them. Also like most rock journalists, and critics in general, they never tire of making lists, a weakness I share. One of my favorite occasional features of theirs is the Desert Island Jukebox, where they take turns adding single tracks to a hypothetical . . . well, I don't really need to explain that, do I?

The charm of the conceit is that they don't have to commit to entire albums. We've all played the game at parties (or on Facebook) about your Top Five Desert Island Records. I've given mine several times and while the list changes slightly from month to month, there are no real surprises there: John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, Pablo Casals' recordings of the Bach cello suites, Aja by Steely Dan, the last set of master takes of Charlie Parker with Strings, and Songs in the Key of Life would probably go in the steamer trunk if I had to pack right now. (I know there's no country/bluegrass/old-time on the list, but I'm not sure I want to listen to "There's a Tear in My Beer," until the Professor can rig those palm trees into a raft.) The game has gotten sillier since Apple has announced the new 42 Bijillion Gig iPod the size of a nickel. Let me take my iPod and no phone and I'll sign up for the desert island excursion right now. But back when we had to limit ourselves to five albums, it could be a tough call. I mean, I love Pet Sounds, but I couldn't hum the melody to "Let's Go Away for Awhile" right now. Could I really afford to use up that vinyl real estate for a less-than-memorable track?

The "Desert Island Jukebox" anticipated the type of listening many of us now do on our iPods. I have all kinds of single tracks by artists whose entire opus I neither know nor particularly care to know. I also find myself listening to playlists almost as often as albums. I've never become a big fan of the shuffle mode, but I have friends who only listen to their iPods on shuffle. The other thing is that it doesn't really limit your choices. Just like our iPods, jukeboxes come in all sorts of sizes, but they all hold a bunch of songs.

So I thought I'd share a "Desert Island Jukebox List" with anyone who cares to read. I've set just a few guidelines for myself.

First, the tracks on this list are ones that I don't associate with their albums. For example, "Wanna Be Startin' Something" is a great song that is probably on five playlists I've made in the last year, but I listen to Thriller from start to finish fairly frequently, so it's a no-go. Likewise, you won't find "Eleanor Rigby," "Just Like a Woman," "If I Was Your Girlfriend," or "Just the Two of Us" on this list either. I would highly recommend, however, you go immediately listen to Revolver, Blonde on Blonde, Sign o' the Times, and Winelight, if these have inexplicably escaped your notice.

Second, this is not a "best of" type of list. It's a jukebox - no need to figure out for our purposes here which are the best five or ten or twenty-five tunes. In the interest of keeping this blog to something like a reasonable list though, I'm going to limit it to ten selections. Not the best ten, mind you, just ten totally listenable tracks that I wouldn't mind listening to while I wait for some stray aircraft to notice the "SOS" I've scratched in the sand.

Last, and related to the previous point, I thought I'd use this as an opportunity to talk about a few favorites that I probably can't fit into any other posts. I'm not going to limit myself to also-rans and one-hit-wonders, but honestly, when will I get another chance to write about Hurricane Smith?

Enough with the rules. Here's the list. And yeah, I'd love for you to add a tune or two in the comments.

"Oh Babe, What Would You Say?" by Hurricane Smith. I heard this song first sung by my oldest brother when I was very small; I actually thought he made it up. I heard the original recording about three years ago for the first time and can say that my brother gave a very faithful rendering of the the vocal, though I hadn't imagined the strings. The saxophone solo sounds like it could have been played by Zoot, from the Muppets (that's a compliment, by the way). Smith was actually Norman Smith, who had engineered The Beatles' early records for EMI and produced the first few albums for Pink Floyd. This song was #3 on the pop charts in the U.S. in 1972 and Smith's biggest hit. To me, it sounds like English dance hall music and demonstrates Nick Hornby's premise that British kids never really rebelled against their parent's music

"Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" by Chuck Berry. One need not justify including a song by Chuck Berry in the desert island juke box, I suppose, but this may seem like an odd choice. Like most Berry classics, this one just rocks and rollicks, but the words really send me. The sly play on racial tensions of the time, including fears that white women would be attracted to black men, are subversive yet fun. The verse about Venus de Milo losing her arms in a wrestling match makes me smile every time.

"Que Sera Sera" by Pink Martini. Have you ever heard a song that you've known your entire life covered by someone new in a fresh way and it made you finally realize what the songwriter intended to say? For most of us, I can imagine that Doris Day's original just sounds like a bright bachelor-pad waltz; you can almost taste the champagne cocktails. Pink Martini's rendition is melancholy, perhaps even a little bitter. The instrumentation - which shimmers at first, then bellows, then shimmers again - coupled with the pedal tones through the verses give a creepy edge. This is music to drive children to alcohol.

"All the Young Dudes" by Mott the Hoople. David Bowie's gift to Mott was their biggest charting hit and became an anthem for the glam-rock era. The song takes swipes at the peace-love generation and their idealism and has more than a just a dark tone to it. I dig the guitar intro especially and it has one of the best rock lyrics of all time, in my opinion: "Television man is crazy, says we're juvenile delinquent wrecks. Ah man, [why do] I need t.v. when I got T. Rex?"

"Game Is My Middle Name" by Betty Davis. Somewhere between Prince, Macy Gray, Sly Stone & Lady GaGa, Betty Davis was one of the wildest wild children of funk. Mrs. Davis, née Mabry, was Miles' one-time wife and a New York fashion model. She was the cover girl for her husband's Filles de Kilimanjaro and even lent her name to one of the tunes, but her eponymous debut album is gritty, dirty funk. Davis was noted for her sexual bravado, as in this track, and her outrageous style. Her voice is gravely. Her delivery is almost conversational, but fierce. She's not the best singer, but that doesn't make her any less compelling as a performer. The band of studio musicians includes Neil Schon, later of Journey, who acquits himself nicely in the company of musicians from Sly & The Family Stone, Graham Central Station, and Tower of Power.

"If I Were Your Woman" by Gladys Knight & The Pips. It's difficult to say what makes this song so compelling to me. The theme is a well-worn, though universal, sentiment; the lyric is obvious ("Life is so crazy, love is unkind"). Even the melody, which is fine, is not particularly memorable. But Gladys' vocal is striking. When she sets to pleading, you can hear all the heartbreak, all the anguish. Alicia Keys re-made the ballad years later (released as "If I Was Your Woman") on her sophomore album The Diary of Alicia Keys paired with "Walk On By." While Keys does an admirable job, the best thing about her version is that it points listeners back to one of soul's most important singers. This is my favorite pop ballad of unrequited love.

"I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues" by Elton John. Let me start by saying that I am not an Elton John fan. I think "Benny & The Jets" is just plain silly and when I hear "Candle in the Wind" it makes me want to stalk and kill celebrities. Having said that, I love this song. Like, play-it-five-times-in-a-row love. Like, sing-along-loudly-even-when-people-can-hear-me love. "Dust out the demons inside" - what a great line! And when he gets to "Rollin' like thunder - under the covers" I like to add a little extra growl on the word "rollin'" (just ask for a rendition next time you see me). Great melody with classic chord changes and a lyric that is mercifully not sentimental ("Between you and me, I can honestly say that things can only get better"). I'm surprised I've not heard a cover of this one.

"Overkill" by Colin Hay. Like "Que Sera Sera," I heard this song for years before I even thought about it. It took Colin Hay, the lead singer of Men at Work, remaking his own song before I gave it a second listen. This version, recorded for the television show Scrubs, is pared down to acoustic guitar and Hays voice. Maybe stripping away those layers of production highlights the angsty lyric. Maybe Hay's delivery is just more reflective, informed as it is by 20+ more years of experience. Or maybe it's just my own ears that are ready to hear what he's saying. I get hooked from that very first scale ("I can't get to sleep") and when he finally begins the final verse, sung an octave higher than the first two, all my own anxieties are ready to make my heart burst.

"All I Could Do Was Cry" by Etta James. There are just so many songs of this era that are neither offensive nor memorable for any real reason, and taken by itself, this is one of them. Or, it would be if Etta James wasn't singing it. Like "If I Were Your Woman," this ballad tells the story of one woman's love for a taken man, only in this one she . . . wait, can you guess? Etta is BRILLIANT and this is another I occasionally listen to several times in a row. I would take this one to a desert island just to hear the way she sings the word "rice." Good, good stuff.

"Show Me Your Teeth" by Lady GaGa. I had to include something new to play while I wait for Hurley to get back from the bunker with dinner. I must confess that I'm not entirely sure what this song is even about. Well, it's about sex, I got that much. Like, something kind of dirty even. But beyond that, I'm not so sure. Like most of GaGa's output, it's hooky and completely danceable. It's also a little scary. The spoken intro ("Don't be scared. I've done this before.") reminds me of Prince's "Computer Blue," and the hook ("Take a bite of my bad girl meat") hits pretty high on the freak scale. Lots of people can do dirty though. GaGa makes it groove hard.

There's my first installment. Care to put in a quarter and pick a tune?

John Holmes, King of the Delta Open Mic

(Originally published July 8, 2009)


1985, Age 13. “Voodoo Child,” by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, from Electric Ladyland.


Once in a while, as a listener, you have those experiences that help crystallize your love of music. Sometimes they happen when you are listening to a record, but more often, it seems, they happen while you are listening to someone create music live. Philosophers in music education refer to these as "peak experiences" and they believe that these are central in creating a real love of music in the listener or performer.


I have had many of these in the course of my life and I would guess that you have, too, especially if you are anything other than a casual fan of music. My first peak experiences with live music probably happened at church, though I don't really remember. I can remember a very important formative experience playing with the marching band for the very first time in 7th grade. I'm sure that our musicianship was far from flawless, yet it had a deep emotional impact with me. That's one of the interesting things about music. You can listen to a technically flawless performance sometimes and be left cold, while inexpert renditions can, on occasion, be intensely moving. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s true.


I guess that most of the vacations I take are in search of these peak musical experiences. They tend to be quite successful, which is why I keep coming back for more. Some of the most memorable over the years include hearing a “cultural troop” perform on Aran Isle, watching Carmen in Prague, and several shows by the Soul Rebels in New Orleans. My most recent vacation has certainly been focused on this search. We arrived by plane in New Orleans, then drove to Memphis and back, traveling through the Mississippi Delta on renowned Highway 61, including a one night stay in Clarksdale, MS. On this trip, we heard funky brass music in New Orleans (including the Soul Rebels and Big Sam’s Funky Nation); blues on Memphis’ Beale St. and in Clarksdale; New Orleans’ blues legend Little Freddie King; and performances at the Essence music festival by John Legend, Salt N Pepa, En Vogue, Beyoncé, Teena Marie and Al Green. It has been an exceptional time listening to music.


Sometimes the most memorable moments are quite unexpected. You go into a club or stop by some street performers not expecting much and you get totally blown away. Or maybe you just see something really surprising, but the effect is the same. I had one of those moments on this trip. If you stop in Clarksdale, MS, there might not appear to be much going on. It’s a slow-moving Delta town with a population under 20,000. There are no crowds downtown. Most of the town, in fact, seems to be a museum to the music that was born here. You can visit the birthplaces of Ike Turner, Sam Cooke and W.C. Handy. You can see the spot where Muddy Waters was “discovered” in 1943. You can drive by (or even stay) at the hotel where Bessie Smith died after a car accident (Ike Turner supposedly rehearsed the seminal rock-and-roll song “Rocket 88” in the basement of the hotel before going to Sam Phillips’ studio in Memphis to record it). Then there is the infamous crossroads of Highways 61 and 49, where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the Devil (it’s actually Highway 161 now, but does that really matter?). And no visit would be complete without a stop at the Delta Blues Museum, which houses the cabin Muddy Waters lived in on Stovall Plantation, along with lots of other blues paraphernalia.


If you want to be close to downtown, there aren’t many options about where to spend the night. Most of the chain hotels lie on the highway outside of town. One option you have is to spend the night at Ground Zero Blues Club. Ground Zero is a club owned by Morgan Freeman and it looks like a more authentic version of House of Blues. The building itself is a former cotton house and the word that most readily comes to mind when you see it is “ramshackle.” They have apartments above the club that you can rent nightly, which are really convenient if you don’t want to risk a post-midnight trip by the crossroads after the club closes. We stayed there on a Thursday night, which is especially convenient as the club has about the only show in town on most Thursdays. The night we were there, they were hosting an open mic, emceed by one “Razorblade,” a Clarksdale resident who came complete with pin-stripe suit, pork-pie hat and two-tone shoes. He sang a full set with the house band (all of whom seemed like they might attend Clarksdale High School). As the club gradually filled to near-capacity of about 150, we heard not just blues, but soul, country, southern rock – the whole fare from the region. Several of the performers seemed like “characters,” not just Razorblade. There was the enormous cowboy in a black hat who sang Alan Jackson songs. There was an older British man who was doing his very best to look and sound like Eric Clapton. There was a man named Tater who sang in a manner very reminiscent of Clark Terry’s “Mumbles,” though after hearing him speak afterward, it was apparent that that was his normal diction. Then there was John Holmes.


We had noticed this man earlier, maybe just a little younger than us, making his way around the club with a sort-of gimpy shuffle, not so much a gangster lean as a grandpa in house slippers. He had long hair which was pulled back into a bun (!), two-tone shoes (apparently the most popular footwear in Clarksdale), khaki pants and a greenish-yellow long sleeve shirt. He also kept the earbuds of his iPod in his ears, even as the band played. After the first break, he made his way to the stage; he was apparently the first name on the open mic sign-up. The first real sign of something going on was when he asked the sound man to tune his guitar for him.


When the break was over, Razorblade mounted the stage, took the microphone and said, “We’re gonna let this gentleman play for you – for just a little while. Maybe five minutes. Please welcome: John.” I suppose I thought this was an unusual way to introduce him, but then I guessed that perhaps there was a five minute limit on each of the performers. After that introduction, the man removed the earbuds from his ears, took his red Ibanez electric in hand and walked to the microphone.


“Some people call me selfish,” he said with a smile. “Some people call me strange. Some people call me ‘Mr. Holmes.’ Other people don’t call me at all.” I began to sense that we were in for something really special. “If you think I suck,” he continued, “just watch my muscles flex.”


At this point, John Holmes took off his dress shirt to reveal a gray undershirt of the “wife-beater” variety. His biceps and forearms were tattooed and he was indeed, rather muscular. He hung the shirt on the back of a chair placed center-stage and then sat in the chair. Though the other performers of the night would opt to perform with the house band, John would be performing solo.


When he began playing, it was without any discernible sense of pulse. The guitar’s tone was cleaner than is typical for electric blues and Mr. Holmes’ technique was not what one would call “practiced.” Upon hearing him, in fact, one might have guessed that he had been playing for about one week, practicing maybe twenty minutes a day. He wandered around the fret board of the instrument, through several keys, executing patterns that seemed familiar to neither the audience nor the performer. There were no scales, no arpeggios, no familiar blues licks that every adolescent guitarist learns within an hour of first touching the instrument. At one point during the improvisation, for I am assuming that is what it was, there was a very brief quote of the lead riff from “Voodoo Child,” inexpertly executed but clearly discernible, the only real suggestion that the guitarist had even a passing familiarity with the blues canon. John Holmes continued in this manner for perhaps three minutes, ending as inauspiciously as he had begun, concluding with neither a grand pause nor a cadence typical of any known style of music.


What was most striking about the performance, however, indeed the thing that rescued it from being anything other than a bizarre joke, was John Holmes’ utter dedication as a performer. It was clear that however strange his phrasing, however unusual his melodic choices, he was committed to this moment. One could easily imagine that this was, perhaps, an exercise by a Zen master who was dedicated to unlearning what he had known about music. Far from another studied and predictable rendition of “Mustang Sally,” Mr. Holmes played with a freshness and exuberance that one hears on Muddy Waters’ early recordings done on Stovall Plantation. He kept his eyes closed throughout and bobbed his head in accompaniment to the guitar.


When he had concluded, applause rippled through the room, from politeness or habit it was difficult to tell, and John Holmes walked again to the microphone.


“I’m sorry if I wasted your precious time, I’ll give it right back to you one of these days,” he said, misquoting Hendrix for the second time that evening.


“One more thing,” John Holmes said as he looked out again with that mischievous smile.


“Rick Springfield – eat your heart out!”


Eat your heart out, indeed.