Guy Davis

River Cities Reader

Trains and Convicts and Pigs and Chickens and Dogs

Guy Davis, April 7 through 11

Written by Mike Schulz

Wednesday, 02 April 2008

Guy Davis

Blues musician Guy Davis 1998 CD You Don't Know My Mind led the San Francisco Chronicle to rave, "Davis' tough, timeless vocals blow through your brain like a Mississippi dust devil." His 2003 release Chocolate to the Bone received a W.C. Handy Award nomination for Best Acoustic Blues Album, one of nine W.C. Handy nominations Davis has received during his career.

So it comes as something of a surprise when Davis, during a recent phone interview, says, "The first time I remember hearing the blues, it was being played by white college boys.

"I think this was at a summer camp up in Vermont ... ," Davis continues. "It was just some guys using guitars, and the first time I heard it I knew it was

special, unique. ... It sounded like something [blues singer] Howlin' Wolf would do. And that kind of led me in my interest."

Chances are good that after next week, a number of Quad Citians will one day recall that the first time they remember hearing the blues, it was being played by Guy Davis.

Here as the final music educator and performer in the Mississippi Valley Blues Society's 2007-8 Blues in the Schools residency series, Davis will conduct workshops at nine area schools - and deliver three public performances - between April 7 and 11. Following residencies with the Kennedy Center, the Lincoln Center Institute, and the State Theatre in New Jersey, the Quad Cities program offers the artist another opportunity to share his love of the blues with children, which has always been of primary importance to Davis. "Before I had an agent," he says, "before I was making any money, I was going into schools and finding some way to play in front of kids."

Part of the appeal in acquainting young listeners with the blues, says Davis, is that "it's not something they may have consciously heard before. Yet it is pervasive in all kinds of music. Music that you hear in advertisements on TV, for instance." Consequently, Davis' youth-oriented workshops tend to focus on the music's origins.

"I'm able to give them a kind of introduction to the blues," he says. "The classes are usually about 45 minutes long, and I tell them about the oldest forms of the blues, starting from the Mississippi Delta, and then the East Coast blues, also known as the Piedmont blues." Davis accompanies this musical history with stylistic examples on harmonica and guitar, and acknowledges that there are numerous other styles to choose from. "But, you know," he adds, "45 minutes can barely get to the beginnings of these two." In exposing children to the blues for the first time, says Davis, "I like to start with a kind of a story, using only a harmonica, with trains and convicts and pigs and chickens and dogs. You get to do all these sound effects, and silly things which hopefully capture the young folks' attention." Davis' own youthful attention, however, was grabbed not only by those guitar-strumming college students, but by his family.

Guy Davis

"My grandparents were I guess what I'd call ‘blues people,'" he says, even though "they did not bring blues into our home - or really even in their home. I didn't grow up with that music. We might've heard church music and such.

"Yet the people who invented the blues are the kind of people like my grandparents," Davis continues. "My granddad was the head man on a team of railroad track liners, and those guys used to sing work songs. And the lyrics to those things are what got turned into the blues." It was at that Vermont summer camp - Camp Killooleet, run by Pete Seeger's brother, John - that the young Davis began immersing himself in blues music,

primarily through the works of legendary performer Huddie William Ledbetter (a.k.a. Lead Belly). And even though it wasn't often heard in their house, Davis soon discovered that his grandparents had more blues awareness than he imagined.

"I remember playing a recording of something called the ‘Track Lining Song,'" he says. "Ed Bell has recorded it; Taj Mahal has recorded it. And I played it for my grandmother, and when the record went off, she sung me two or three verses that weren't on the record."

Before the age of 10, Davis began teaching himself to play guitar. "I've had about five, maybe six formal lessons in my life," he says. "The best one came from a guy with nine fingers. It was on a train back in the '70s. He was missing his index finger, and he taught me more than anybody about finger-pickin'.

"So I'd just take anything I learned, or stole," Davis adds, "and just go sit on the edge of the bed with the guitar and just go over it and over it and over it for hours."

In addition to such artists as Lead Belly, Buddy Guy, and Junior Wells, Davis states that inspiration during his early years as a blues musician came principally from "Taj Mahal - that and a lot of Blind Willie McTell," as he was always moved by "the storytelling quality of their songs."

It's a quality that the singer-songwriter himself has long pursued. "I remember trying to write songs back in the late '60s, early '70s. Trying to write songs. And," says the man whose 2000 composition "Waiting on the Cards to Fall" received a W.C. Handy nomination for Best Blues Song, "I guess I'd just been at it and tryin' it for so doggone long that I eventually crossed some line to where I could do it."

Guy Davis

Davis says that storytelling has been as influential in his career as music. "My grandmother was a fantastic storyteller," he recalls, and again references the impact of his summers spent at Camp Killooleet. "I met and heard a lot of wonderful storytellers there when I was younger. Those are the people who kind of inspired me. Those stories were magic to me. I remember hearing stories around the light of a campfire, with a whole bunch of other campers all sitting in a circle. Those are some of the best times I've ever had in my life." Considering Davis' lineage, he is the son of legendary actors Ruby Dee and the late Ossie Davis, it makes perfect sense that his interests in storytelling would also lead him to the stage, and in addition to his work as a musician, the blues man has also managed to forge a successful acting career. In 1991, after a brief television stint on One Life to Live, Davis made his Broadway debut in the Zora Neale Hurston/

Langston Hughes collaboration Mulebone (featuring the music of Taj Mahal), and in 1994, he wrote and performed the one-man, off-Broadway show In Bed with the Blues: The Adventures of Fishy Waters, which he continues to tour. "I get to tell stories, I get to sing songs. ... It's just that it happens to be a play," he says.

And in addition to his stage work, his workshop residencies, and his concert tours, Davis continues to release blues CDs, with eight in the past 10 years, and a ninth currently in production. "There's not much I can tell you about it," says Davis of his forthcoming offering, "‘cause the more I talk, the less gets done."

Guy Davis performs free public concerts at the Fairmount Street Public Library on April 8, Mojo's coffee house on April 9, and the Quad City Arts Center on April 11 (all at 7 p.m.), and more information is available by visiting (http://www.mvbs.org).