D. Craig’s Blues
It’s just music, right? No, my friend, it’s so much more than that.
I believe that it speaks to the universal Soul in us all, regardless of who we are or what our circumstances might be. The Blues touches each of us in those most intimate inner places where despair, joy, pain, elation, great emotion and sense of self reside in us all. It lifts up, hammers down, holds our feet to the fire, mirrors our brightest and darkest thoughts, speaks of love, loss, sex , dreams , hope , money….all the things that life lays upon our human table in paucity or abundance. Its call is a response to those longings that reach out from inside every man, woman and child. It speaks truth to evil, but gives the devil his due. Every one of us fights the battle of good and evil. Sometimes the temptation is too strong and we dance with that devil and the Blues is there to swing the tune.
I came to the blues in the late 60’s. A white college boy in west Texas, my introduction was through the Chicago Blues of Butterfield, Bloomfield and Bishop and the black night clubs of Amarillo, Texas. The resurrection of the delta Blues by the British sounds of Mayall, Clapton, Green, and Jagger eventually exposed me to their own inspirations ; Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Johnson. My personal journey led me to the music mecca of Austin, TX in 1968, a place where you could hear any kind of music on any given night. There I found Lightnin Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, Freddy King, Taj Mahal, Janis Joplin, singing outside the UT student union at lunch, and in a magic place called the “Vulcan Gas Company” on Congress Ave a ghostlike phenome with magic in his fingers and gravel in his voice, Johnny Winter. I was injected with the blues there and hoped never to be cured of the infection. It’s an affliction that I love to this very day. It has brought friends, lovers, joy and occasional darkness into my life but I would not trade for the experiences. I’ve been a player of blues guitar most of my adult life and although I don’t claim any great skill in that endeavor it has nonetheless brought me great personal fulfillment. The blues and the music speaks to us all each to his own way. For me it is my balm when times are hard. It soothes my Soul. As I played one night, a friend, during an evening around a campfire, once wondered aloud to me about the nature of God and where He might be hiding in these particularly turbulent times. My immediate thought and response “Sometimes He is here in the guitar.”……. Sometimes He is there in the Blues !
D. Craig
"Play De Blues"