Elmore Magazine - Kickin’ in Your Stall

Monday August 1st, 2005 @ 9:00 PM

Filed under: Everything, Publications

Emotional Intelligence

“Sonny Boy Williamson was just another big, dumb, N_____,” he sneered between sips of Vodka. “He was a no good drunk, lived in a dump, and was the biggest liar in town. Hell, even his damned name was a lie. He killed a man too. And we make the sonovabitch into a hero.

I looked at the two bricks lying on the bar. They had just torn down the “dump” where Sonny Boy had lived, and I snagged the bricks with the intention of putting them on my big roll-top desk at home.

The man continued his tirade, “You Yankee bastards idolize Sonny Boy enough to take the bricks from his shanty.” He paused to consider the irony, and chuckled. “Hell, the big ape didn’t even have a car, walked everywhere he went. Harmonicas only cost a quarter back then and Sonny Boy still couldn’t afford ‘em. Ask old man Gist down at the music store, he’ll tell you the club owners used to keep harps back ‘o the bar for Sonny Boy and loan them to him when he came to play. If they let him have them he’d blow them out playing for somebody else and wouldn’t have one next time he came around.

We paused and took in the bust of Sonny Boy sitting on the bar next to us that had started our conversation. I was saddened as the man finished his assessment of one of the most famous Blues men to have ever lived, “His last day on earth he was playing at a high school graduation party, May of “65″ and a bunch of us kids got to watch him puke blood. Ornery old bastard drank himself to death.”

The man who told me these things died a couple of years later of alcohol poisoning. It was a more sophisticated death than Sonny Boy got because it was in a hospital and cost him lots of money, thereby making it respectable. I guess that’s where smart people go to die.

Unfortunately, most of what this bigoted man told me was true, and he therefore equated Sonny Boy’s miserable existence with being “dumb,” as in stupid. Sonny Boy, a.k.a., Rice Miller, among several other aliases, was a lot of bad things, but he wasn’t stupid.

Innate intelligence tries to find a way to surface in a personality, even when it is stifled in ignorance, poverty, poor habits and negative values. If it is not given the avenue of formal education it finds a route in feelings. For lack of a better term, I call it emotional intelligence, and I see evidence of it in ignoble blues musicians like Sonny Boy.

He was a journalistic Christmas Tree festooned in vivid metaphors: His chest, a blacksmith bellows rushing wind through a broken picket fence of bad teeth…hands like condor wings flapping a great rush of wah, wahs, onto notes bent like palm trees in a hurricane…a clown goat in derby-topped harlequin suit who could play the harp Popsicle fashion with no hands…

He couldn’t afford a giant brace of harmonica’s which he blew out faster than less powerful players, so he learned to get the most out of what he had. He learned to play in different keys with one diatonic harp. Now without launching into a detailed harp lesson, suffice it to say that I play harp just well enough to know how incredibly hard that is. He had to know every harp position well enough to know which notes to play in every different key, and/or he had to overblow, or blow-bend the draw notes, which maybe one in ten thousand harp players, can do worth a tinker’s damn. My money says that we could take every Rhodes scholar and Rocket Scientist in America and give them unlimited time to practice and they’d come up for air scratching their collective great brains.

While Sonny Boy is probably the most quoted harp player in history, which says all that is needed about his original vocabulary of licks, comps, and runs, this column isn’t about just him. I am using him as a window through and beyond the prejudice and ignorance that keep the geniuses of our root music in ignominy. It’s a scene where “poor dumb blacks” would unravel the wire around a broom and stretch and nail it to a board from the porch to make a slide guitar with the aid of a coke bottle. It’s a testimony to the those living in blistering poverty who took the harmonica, invented in Europe to play simple melodies, and figured out how to bend the notes and coax a haunting beauty and a whole new genre of music from unintended depths of the simple reeds. It’s a tribute to the emotionally intelligent who were given nothing else by God and country, and who returned to us an entirely new dimension of understanding music.

Posted by Carl