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By Root 647 0

Blood Blues,’ ” and the piano man started into a series of rolls and falls, going with just the bottom line from the bass player. It wasn’t loud, but it was intrusive, insistent—impossible to ignore. So much so that by the time the guitarists and the drummer were there, too, the crowd was waiting to hear what the kid had to say. He cupped the harp around the microphone, then appeared to change his mind and just got to it. Unlike most white blues singers, the kid didn’t try to sound black. The words came out firm and clean, not covered by the band:

I always tried to do right,

But everything I did seemed to turn out wrong.

I always tried to do right,

But everything I did seemed to turn out wrong.

I didn’t mean to stay with that woman,

At least not for very long.

and you could hear the crowd shut down and shift over to a listening stance. By the middle of the second verse the kid was getting shouts of agreement when he sang:

Oh I knew that she was evil,

People told me she was mean.

Yes, I knew that she was evil,

And people told me she was mean.

I knew that she was evil . . .

But I always thought that she was clean.

Then the kid bridged into a hard, anticipative harp solo, taken against the bass and rhythm guitar, letting the crowd know he was going to explain the mystery to them in just a little while. And he did:

Well, she never gave me nothing,

She just about ruined my life.

You know she never gave me nothing,

She just about ruined my life.

And when she finally gave me something . . .

(By then, we all knew what he was talking about.)

I brought it home to my poor wife.

And behind shouts of “That’s right!” and “Had to be!” the kid picked up the harp again and the blues came out. Just that simple, and damn-near perfect. By then the people knew where he was going, where a story like his had to go:

Now my life is so empty,

My wife don’t want to see my face.

My life is so empty,

And my wife don’t want to see my face.

I got to walk this road alone,

Bad blood, it’s my disgrace.

And the kid rolled the harp down with the rest of the band and finished. He had them all moving now and he went uptempo but stayed with the blues. The harp barked into a fast lead, the piano floated off the top, and then the kid sang his own road song:

I got a long way to travel, honey,

I’m sorry you can’t come

And people in the crowd who knew what he meant chuckled in agreement.

I got a long way to travel, honey,

I’m sorry you can’t come.

You are all used up, babe,

And I have just begun.

Like a lot of the blues, sex got mixed up with everything else. The kid grabbed a breath:

I got a long way to go, babe,

And I know that you don’t care.

I got a long way to go, babe,

And I know that you don’t care . . . just where

You wouldn’t like it anyway, babe,

They ain’t got no suburbs there.

And the harp barked its challenge to the crowd, wailing out the don’t-mind-dying credo of all bluesmen as the tape finally ran to its end.

That was the first tape in my collection—I’ve added dozens since. I got some early Paul Butterfield, Delbert McClinton, Kinky Friedman (and if you think this guy’s just a quasi-cowboy clown, listen to “Ride ’Em Jewboy” just once), Buddy Guy, Jimmy Cotton—all live. I had a Muddy Waters tape too, but it sounded like he was playing Prom Night in the suburbs someplace, the same way Charley Musselwhite did when I caught him at some college hangout near Boston. I don’t blame either of them, but I erased the tapes. I have some stuff I didn’t record myself too, some Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, stuff like that. I keep the tapes in the Plymouth to help me do the waiting—I’ve got more sense than to listen to them inside a closed room.

About an hour later I saw a black Lincoln Town Coupe pull up under the elevated portion of the West Side Highway, the part they’re never going to finish building. Saw a flash of nylons as a woman climbed out of the front seat, working before she hit the ground. She disappeared into the shadows and the Lincoln