Black and Blue

On Wednesday, I got off my train from Ottawa and headed to The Paradise Theatre. The Toronto Blues Society was hosting perhaps its first ever book-launch. Josephine Matyas and Craig Jones, a travel writer and musician respectively, chronicled their 6 weeks camper-van tour through Mississippi. Part travelogue, part historical archive, Chasing The Blues traced the roots of the Delta Blues through slavery, brutal sharecropper conditions, as well as the geography of both the richness (fertile topsoil) and the peril (flood of 1927) of the Mississippi river and its lands. Matyas and Jones also let the voices of current caretakers of the Delta Blues speak of their experiences and memories.

As interviewed by Richard Flohil, I was impressed by their ready knowledge. As someone who struggle to remember names of coworkers and friends if I haven't seen them, I was envious of their ability to quickly recall people, places, and events in abundant detail. They also touched briefly on both the economic and racial situation in present-day Mississippi which hasn't improved much in the intervening decades.

Both Flohil and a TBS presenter jokingly talked about the (now) mostly white audience for Blues music given its debt to Black Americans. So it was ironic that the majority of that white audience didn't stick around for Harrison Kennedy (Chairmen of the Board), a music veteran who now resides in Hamilton.

Throughout his solo set, I was struck by how much the Blues was about rhythm and beat. Whether with shakers, spoons, harmonica, banjo or guitar, he kept each song propulsively moving. Most of his tunes weren't about love or breakups (though Keep Your Coat On cranked up the sexual heat), but working-class conditions, social injustices, and human frailty. Kennedy was also a fun storyteller. His covers (Imagine, What's Going On) included his own stories about those well-known musicians. And over his long career, he has met many. His own songs were also prefaced with various family and professional anecdotes from a hard-drinking grandfather to a hound-dog cousin to missing out on a Grammy (which went to Clarence Carter) because a producer thought the Chairmen of the Board's song Patches was too country for their soul sound.

Despite being 79, his voice was strong and he had energy to spare. So much so that the presenter had to discretely ask him to wrap up his set after about an hour. For Kennedy, only "20 minutes had passed". He was still passionate about music and revealed that he was working on his next album.