Author, actor and blues musician Guy Davis is coming to Qualicum Beach to make the blues new again, bringing excitement to old standbys and his own music alike.
Ahead of his performance Oct. 1 at the Beaton residence, Davis spoke with the NEWS about how the blues became new and exciting for him — a kid living in New York with progressive parents who had no idea what the blues was, or that it came from black people.
As a kid, it was folk and acoustic music (especially by Pete Seeger) he heard played by counsellors at a summer camp in the early ’60s that he enjoyed. “I loved the sound of it, and some of what they played was blues,” said Davis.
He knew next to nothing about the music and its history, as it wasn’t emphasized at home.
“When I came back home, I wasn’t immediately aware that the blues was something specific to black people… who created it,” he said.
But he slowly learned more about it, listening to his parents’ record collection, “and I heard stories told by my grandmother who had come from Georgia and South Carolina.”
Davis said music in general, and live music especially, held something special for him early on. “From the first time I ever sat down… and I saw a person on the stage with a guitar, to me it was magic. I mean, how could you take a chunk of wood with some strings on it and make it tell stories?
“The sounds that came out of it got me excited or they got me sad or they got me happy.”
But the blues held something a little extra special that Davis said he still has trouble putting his finger on.
“It might have to do a little bit with mythology,” he said.
“They used to tell a story about this guy named Lead Belly (otherwise known as Huddie William Ledbetter, a folk and blues musician)… and they said that Lead Belly sang his way off of a chain gang twice, and they put Lead Belly’s name in songs,” said Davis. “I remember one of those songs… had a line in it about a fellow who had a special pair of shoes that had a heal in the front and in the back so when he was running through the dirt, nobody could tell which way he was going when he was escaping from prison.”
“So I guess the story of it, the stories that the music evoked are probably what drew me to it.”
Singing, playing guitar and harmonica, Davis eventually became known as an ambassador of the blues.
While he’s quick to note that he feels B.B. King is perhaps the greatest ambassador the blues has had, Davis said he wants to bring the excitement of the blues to people, and to continue to tell the stories of the blues that matter to the history of the U.S. and the world.
“For the world, I say that the blues is not just black history in America, it’s American history. It tells a story to the world about survivors,” he said. And even if, like him as a kid, that history has been disconnected from people, it’s important to reach back for it.
“My parents had come up out of the south and had come from the midwest into New York to live lives that involved urban culture quite a bit in the theatre and such. That doesn’t mean that I or anybody should be cut off from what are our roots,” said Davis.
“My grandfather, my father’s father, was a head man on a team of railroad track liners. And they used to sing work songs. I never got to hear him sing any of this stuff, but I once took a record album by Taj Mahal that included a song called the ‘Track Lining Song’, and Lead Belly had sung this too. And I played it on the phonograph for my grandmother and when the song went off, she sang like two more verses that weren’t on it. Because she came up out of the real thing. Out of the blues, out of the people who created the blues.
“Now just because I’m a couple of generations later and I went to school and I learned how to speak the white man’s language as good as the white man, as well as the white man I should say (laughs), does not mean I should forget or be forgotten by blues culture.”
Davis notes that other groups, like Native Americans, have had their culture taken away in much harsher ways than he experienced, yet that blues culture, and the lives that his grandparents had lived were not what he learned.
“Southernisms and old stories and old country people’s tales were not being emphasized. When I was in school we were talking about Shakespeare. They’re talking about literature, talking about George Bernard Shaw. Well I’m just here to say all those things are important, but also let us reach back to that which we have been separated from either by time or distance or by design, by oppression, by whatever, by slavery, let’s reach back and include that, because it’s part of us, even if it’s ugly to some people’s ears, it is part of us.”
Davis will perform in Qualicum Beach Monday, Oct. 1 at 7:30 p.m..
Tickets are $30. For tickets and for the location, contact Joyce Beaton via beatonqualicum@gmail.com.
