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This article was first published in May, 1999 after Guy Davis had
appeared at the
Rosendale Cafe. Guy appeared there again last month.
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Guy-wired Show
Award-Winning Bluesman Guy Davis at the Rosendale Cafe
by Gary Alexander
You
probably think that there are only 3 certainties in life...Death,
taxes and the indubitableness of the 20-mph-under-the-speed-limit-cruise
of that car which pulls out just before you reach its driveway on a
narrow country road with only 12 minutes left to make the post office
with your urgent mailings. Ah, the virtues of patience...But, actually,
there is another certainty...Guy Davis, who played the
Rosendale Cafe on
Friday will win a national award for Best Blues.
 There is, of course, a why attached to that particular observation
and Davis's performance explained it in detail to a packed house of
appreciative and curiously polite fans. The fan characterization is
courtesy of a hangover or holdover (but no longer applicable) image of
blues and boogie fans as joyous, dancin' rowdies. If you've got a
mailbox on a pole outside your house, you've been well instructed on the
limits of liquid enjoyment. Smoke-hazed rooms are history. The currently
slimmed and sanitized club scene would allow little of such untoward
behavior at respectable venues like the Rosendale Cafe and after he
tested the crowd early with an audience chorus response on Rev. Gary
Davis's "Candy Man" (reactive but mannered- just picture hootin' &
hollerin' with moderating restraint and civil dignity) the notion was
dropped. This was not a roll-up-your-sleeves group.
Davis opened with "Georgia Jellyroll" on a Harmony 12-string he
picked up for a steal in Flagstaff last year, proving there's still gold
in the West, and riveted the room with deeply shaded, slightly raspy
vocal tones telling the story like he heard it first hand. He parked his
right wrist firmly on the guitar bridge for solid purchase and
finger-picked with a clean strength that had you looking for the power
chord in his sleeve.
With a sprinkling of standards like Robert Johnson's "Dust My Broom"
and "Judgment Day"; a Willie McTell and one or two others, he held court
for two lengthy and delectable sets of derivative originals with his own
wings attached; risque and humorous; poignant and ballady; mournful and
nasty. His connective folktales and stories captured the spirit of the
form as a finely-tuned and literate sense of drama mingled almost
paradoxically with downhome delta grit in mesmerizing progression.
A feature of the first set was Davis's own "Georgia Flood," which is
from a play he's been writing and serves well as a tantalizer for the
rest of it. It's a piece which would hold its own with any of the best
entries from the Blues Immortals. If that seems a rash statement, listen
to it on his third Red House album, You Don't Know my Mind and tell me
I'm wrong. Davis writes almost all of the selections on his CDS and what
he doesn't, he makes his own. He has found the source roots of the blues
and planted his own seeds there.
Blues historian Paul Oliver found the origin of blues "(b)uried deep
in the fertile ground of the Revival hymns, the spirituals, the minstrel
songs, the banjo and guitar rags, the mountain ‘ballits,' the folk
ballads, the work songs and the field hollers...which began to take form
at some indeterminate time in the late nineteenth century." When it grew
its own legs as a genre, it became so entangled with the core of
American music that it's now inexorably seated in our collective
subconscious perceptions. I defy you to read this line without "hearing"
the music; "Woman I loved, stole from my best friend/ but the sucker got
stupid, stole her back again."
You see? Blues is intrinsic to our psyche. It's just there. But Guy
Davis marks the difference between being able to PLAY the blues and
being able to DO the blues. Once you've got the latter, you can take it
where you will and he takes it for a new ride- not on the authenticity
of the tradition but on his own authenticity.
First of all, acoustic blues are upon one level raw and basic, the
wellsprings of rock, but they also come in a variety of stylistic
flavors. Much of the genre you'll hear on the airwaves these days are
the standard cuts of the classic artists or imitative covers by more
recent devotees. What we've heard less of, until the arrival of artists
such as Davis, Keb Mo, Paul Geremia and a few others, are vital
extrapolations and developments of originality in the blues, an item
which more often boils down to adaptations of fitting material from a
vast body of recorded work to a player's strength or, more ambitiously,
‘what can I bring to this lick?'
In the case of Guy Davis, who was born into a sophisticated and
successful theatrical family, (son of Ossie davis and Ruby Dee),
acoustic blues, with its primitive, rough-edged and urgent appeal
(smothered for some decades in the black community by the slickness of
soul), would seem an unlikely pursuit. But, to his credit and our gain,
Davis studied the stylings to a point of mastery and, more importantly,
absorbed the impetus of their original dynamics. Then he became more
than the actor who well knew his part. He became that which his part was
about. He took his grip on those building blocks and sensibilities and
used it in the application of his own flights of intelligent creativity.
The crown jewel of the evening was an amalgam of song and story spun
around an old songster in Mississippi named Juno passing on the
tradition to a youngster and the passing down of tradition in general. A
colorful stunner not yet recorded in this form, it would have filled a
full side on vinyl LP without a slackening of focus.
Perhaps blues has become a taken-for-granted idiom in the latter
decades of the century because of "been there-heard that" repetition of
many artists yet to realize the form as not only a tradition but a
launch site. Albert Murray put it succinctly, if more than a bit
academically, in a series of lectures in 1972 collected as
The Hero and The Blues the following year:
"Essentially, questions about experimentation in the arts are also
questions about the relevance of tradition. They are questions, that is
to say, about the practical application of traditional elements to
contemporary problem situations," Murray said. "Hence they are also
questions about change and continuity. Indeed, they are specifically
concerned with the requirements for continuation, which is to say
endurance, which is also to say survival. Implicitly, experimentation is
also an action taken to insure that nothing endures which is not
workable; as such, far from being anti-traditional, as is often assumed,
it actually serves the best interests of tradition, which, after all, is
that which continues in the first place. The traditional element is
precisely the one which has endured or survived from situation to
situation from generation to generation. To refer to the blues idiom is
to refer to an established mode, an existing context or frame of
reference.
"But then not only is tradition that which continues, it is also the
medium by which and through which continuation occurs. It is, or so it
seems in the arts at any rate, precisely that in terms of which the
objectives of experimentation are defined, and against which
experimental achievements are evaluated." Cool, Albert, you'd ‘a dug
Guy.
Okay, confession time. The absolute bet-the-farm certainty which
opens this review is based on the fact that Davis has already won the
W.C. Handy Keeping the Blues Alive Award and, at the 20th Annual W.C.
Handy Blues Awards and Festival and Beale Street Parade this weekend in
Memphis, he's nominated for 3 more- including Best Blues Album for
You Don't Know my Mind. It's a stirringly exceptional work that no serious
blues collection can overlook. Now, if I was bettin' man...
Gary Alexander
is an independent journalist and scholar whose focus of
interests range through a variety of disciplines. Under various names,
he has written (and ghost written) upon history and current event;
science and technology, as well as music and the arts in books and for
national periodicals. While particularly attentive to the subtle and
complex impact upon cultural imagination and contemporary structures of
presumption which activity in the above mentioned topics tend to have,
Alexander treats his topics with a slightly more than occasional resort
to humor.
Posted on December 1, 2000
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