Players - Downbeat

Backstage With …
By Aaron Cohen
Buddy
Guy
When blues hero Buddy Guy could be anywhere
in the world, each January he performs
almost every night throughout the
month at his Chicago club, Legends.
Onstage on Jan. 9, he forgot the snowfilled
sidewalks as easily as he ignored his
72 years for a set that featured his dazzling
guitar work, as well as his gentle voice,
especially as he sang the moving title track
of his latest disc, Skin Deep (Silvertone). He
took time to chat in his office above the bar
at the beginning of his residency.
What makes you keep performing here in
the dead of winter when you could be in,
say, Florida right now?
I do this every January and most shows
are sold out. I was thinking, “Somebody
should be able to come in and do the same
thing in February.” But I don’t know anybody
else who could play in Chicago for a
month and sell it out. And I don’t do nothing
different than anybody else. I get
seniority for having done it for 51 years, so
people think they should come out from
the cold and see me warm things up for a
little bit.
On Skin Deep, you and Robert Randolph
make a great pairing.
Robert does a tremendous job. I want to
put two or three spirituals on my next
record. His family is so good at that, and
there are so many good spiritual records
you hardly hear. Blues and spirituals are so
closely related. B.B. King said the only dif-
ference with us and other singers is
we hold the notes longer, we don’t
snap the words like hip-hop. That’s
the way they were singing those
spirituals before they started bringing
keyboards and drums in there.
The Pilgrim Travelers, Five Blind
Boys: They didn’t have instruments,
just voices making all that great
music. I used to listen to them with
my mother—they had some voices,
didn’t they?
This was also the first disc where all
the tracks were written by you, or
your drummer, Tom Hambridge.
When I came to Chess in ’57, ’58,
nobody was listening to what I had.
Later on in life with my education of
what was going on with writers,
record companies and producers, I
saw that if they didn’t get a part of it,
you didn’t get the song in there. Now,
when I asked, they finally said, “I don’t
know, but OK.”
PAUL NATKIN/PHOTO RESERVE
So now you have a song like “Skin Deep,”
which is a moving and personal account of
racism. What were the circumstances that
led to the song?
My parents were sharecroppers, working
on the plantation for the white man. I was
about 5 when his family’s son was born.
When he was 3, they used to pick me up to
bring me to their house to play with him all
day because he wasn’t old enough to go to
school and we didn’t have a school. After
he got big enough to walk, we would walk
home at night and we used to have a flashlight.
I would shine the light on my hand
and his hand and he’d say, “They used to
tell me that your blood is black and mine is
white, but I see red blood in both our
hands.” When he got to be 13, they said
we couldn’t play together. But he was the
first person I wanted to have the CD.
In one way or another, the blues always
addressed these deep issues.
I tell people who say they don’t like blues
that if you turn your television on and see
what’s going on with the world and turn on
Son House or Lightnin’ Hopkins, you’ll ask,
“How could they have known about all this
stuff way back then?” It’s because they
were telling the truth about everyday life.
That’s what I’m trying to do every time I
play the blues. DB
New Orleans Hosts
Danny Barker
Centennial Parties
Danny Barker had many roles during his life. He
played guitar and banjo behind Billie Holiday,
Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong and his wife,
Blue Lu Barker, along with recording several
albums as a leader. But in his hometown, his
biggest impact may have been forming the
Fairview Baptist Church Band in the early ’70s
to teach young musicians the New Orleans brass
band tradition. As 2009 marks the centennial of
Barker’s birth, the Crescent City is celebrating
his contributions and personality with yearround
festivities.
“He was a part of the culture,” guitarist/banjoist
Detroit Brooks said about Barker, who
died in 1994. “He taught what he learned with
those great musicians and to the kids here. He
planted the seeds that grew trees like Nicholas
Payton, Michael White and Herlin Riley.”
The French Market Corporation and the Jazz
Centennial Celebration led by Jason Patterson
put on the Danny Barker Festival on Jan. 16 and
17 (his birthday was Jan. 13). Barker’s students—including
trumpeters Leroy Jones and
Greg Stafford—were featured on one stage.
Another had storytellers relating the history of
Barker and his music, as well as readings from
his books, including his autobiography A Life In
Jazz. A club crawl in the Faubourg Marigny
neighborhood let listeners saunter between
nightspots, hearing different bands with guitars
and banjos as their lead instruments.
The French Quarter Festival in April, the
New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in April
and May, and the Satchmo Summerfest in
August also have plans for musical dedications,
interviews and lectures about Barker. Performers
at the Jazz and Heritage Fest will include a
reunited Fairview Baptist Chuch Band.
“Danny was a walking embodiment of all
the things that you think of in the quintessential
jazz cat,” said Scott Aiges, New Orleans Jazz
and Heritage Foundation program direrctor.
“He carried that torch so that another generation
would know what a real jazz guy looked and
sounded like.” —David Kunian
HERB SNITZER
April 2009 DOWNBEAT 19