Who Will The Next Guy Be- Guy Davis Carries The Blues in His Juba Dancer

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Juba Dancer, Guy Davis, 2013

Many years ago I posed a question to some friends, some aficionados of the genre, about who would carry on the blues tradition, the black-etched blues. You know, the old time country down in the Delta, picking Mister’s cotton dawn to dusk, living day and night by Mister James Crow’s rules, and living for Saturday night in some no electricity juke joint drinking low-shelf hooch, eying some full-breasted women, and ready to cut any man six ways to Sunday, maybe more, if the mood struck. And listening to some Mississippi Slim, some Bumble Bee Slim, some Preacher Jack, some Blind and you can fill in the blank last name satisfying everybody’s mind with some plain old-fashioned picking and telling a story, a story, well, a story about women troubles, man troubles, troubles with Mister, too much of that low-shelf hooch and much else. That much else meaning to stretch Saturday night Sunday morning before some non-blues imbibing real preacher puts an end to that devil’s music and to be quickly replaced by some praise Jehovah thing.

The answer, or answers, to that question came up in a pretty short list of those, mainly black, who rather than grab onto the hip-hop nation coattails wanted to keep the roots, the Delta and Chicago city blues roots, and maybe going back further to Mother Africa roots alive. Right at the top of that short list stood one Guy Davis who over the years has through his performances, teaching, and, as here with this latest CD, Juba Dancer, done his damnedest to keep the traditions alive.

That tradition today, maybe more so that when I posed it long ago, needs care and protection if it is not to be some relic of a by-gone time but continues as a vibrant way to tell the peoples’ woes, big ones like Mister on your back and small ones like that two-timing woman who done you wrong. Now way back in the 1960s, the early 1960s mainly, there were a lot of us who almost by osmosis sought out the traditional blues music as part of a general interest in roots music. That was the famed, long gone folk minute that brought forth the likes of Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Dave Van Ronk and many others to sit at the feet of some old time blues masters and learn their material. That was the heyday of the “discovery” of now legendary performers like Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, Mississippi John Hurt, Sippie Wallace and Alberta Hunter.

At that time I would not have posed the question I pose today because I would have assumed that then expected folk eternity to produce its fair share of those who would carry on the blues tradition. That did not happen and moreover the work that was produced, and some of it was very good, suffered from that thing that made the blues the blues. Immersion in that misery of Mister’s cotton, the hell of Mister James Crow, and the drowned sorrows of the Saturday night juke joint. It was almost a DNA thing that those white voices just did not carry that same sense that the simplest old boy country blues player brought to the table.

And Guy Davis, son of the late famed actors and civil right activists Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, a city boy mainly, does not exactly evoke that downtrodden edge either, But he comes damn close. And that bring us to this compilation of Guy works with some new work like the title cut Juba Dancer (Juba going back to slavery times and back further to Mother Africa time) and old-time stuff like Blind Willie McTell’s Statesboro Blues where his gravelly voice evokes those old-time country blues players. He does his work with a strong sense of history, his hard scrabble history, and in his own style (or better, styles since on some stuff he sounds like the son of John Hurt and others like the son of Mississippi Fred McDowell). I might add that I have recently seen his perform many of the cuts on this CD in concert and he proved quite the showman, quite the entertainer. And played a harmonica to die for, practically devouring the night and evoking Sonny Terry when he held forth on that instrument. It must be in the DNA. Ossie and Ruby would have been proud.