In keeping with the title, I’d like to start off with this tune that I had wrote when I was very sick. Actually shortly after a very serious illness; I had chickenpox at the age of twenty-five. It was bad. It was real bad. So I wrote this tune called High Fever Blues that came out years ago just as a way to document the experience, so I’ll play it for you. [Plays song: High fever got me but I ‘aint no use. I feel like I ‘aint no use. I can’t even tie my shoe. Everybody think I am on my dying bed. Everybody think I’m on my dying bed. Well I asked my baby, won’t you come and rub my aching head. (Humming and scanting). I look in my cupboard, blues all in my door. I look in my cupboard, blues all in my door. High fever come along and make a rich man poor. ]

I had a professor in college, someone I really admired, a Jamaican named David Scott, a professor of Anthropology. I don’t know if any of you have heard of him, but he is a well-known writer. And we were talking about comparing blues and the whole concept of blues to what they call in Jamaica, sufferation. And he was saying that, to him, it was strange that blues is something that you can catch. You can get the blues or come down with the blues. Whereas he was saying down in Jamaica, sufferation is like something that’s in the air. You can’t escape it. You’re not born away from it. It’s always there with you. So that’s something that always stayed with me. Just the concept of the blues as something that you can come down with and it’s not a permanent affliction, as you doctors may call it, but it’s something that you can definitely get and it affects your life. But I guess another thing that I want to talk about with ya’ll is just really what I see the blues as being and what it has come to be through history. If you look at the history of black people in America, it’s a history of suffering. And one of the things I was thinking of before I came here is that when you’re suffering, no matter who you are, you want to give your suffering a voice. It makes you sick if you can’t say, “This is what’s bothering me”. “This is what’s oppressing me”. Whatever it is, no matter who you are. And I see primarily, not only blues, but just the whole world of music as being a way to deal with that suffering and to keep people on a mental balance. If you look at the Black South, like my mother grew in an area near Louisiana in north east Texas and she often tells me that they couldn’t congregate unless you were in church or unless you went to this juke joint where people could party at night or something, but you couldn’t just have a meeting and talk about how we are being oppressed - “Let’s go deal with this” - you couldn’t do that so there were very few areas where people could express themselves or they could share information relating to what they were dealing with.

They had a newspaper that my grandfather wrote for called the Chicago Defender, which back in the day was something if you were caught with, you could be killed in places like Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, or Georgia because it was a subversive tool. Chicago Defender was about educating people, about giving them knowledge about legal rights, that sort of thing. So information was restricted. Likewise you could only congregate in church or in a juke joint. So to me, blues is a way that people had to keep in touch with what’s going in their community, to share things that affected all of them, and like I said, a way to keep from getting ill. Because if you have something that is wrong with you, I’m sure you would agree, eventually you will get sick once way or another. But in keeping with the blues as something that you catch, there is a tune written by a man named William Blake, which is not the English guy from a long time ago. But the other William Blake and they call him Blind Blake and he came from Northern Florida and he’s one of the greatest blues and ragtime guitarists from back in the day. There’s a tune that he recorded called CC Pill Blues. [Plays song: Early this morning, blues knocking on my door. Well I said early this morning, blues knocking on my door. Well I said, hello blues, come to bother you some more? Well now blues and trouble are my two best friends. Blues and trouble are my two best friends. When my blues walks out, my trouble comes waltzing in. Well now hey, hey, hey mama, what you want me to do? Well now hey, hey mama, what you want me to do? Take a CC pill; that’s the way for you. I looked at my door and blues come walking in. well I looked at my door and blues come walking in. Well I just come here, why are you here again?]

In my own travels, I’ve come across people who have been affected by the music I play and it’s been strange. One time, this was just last year, I was in Florida (in Homestead, Florida) playing a gig and this guy comes up to me after the gig saying, “I want to tell you that really like your music,” and he used to be addicted to crack cocaine like heavily and he said one day he decided he was going to kick it and said that he just started playing my music and it helped him kick the habit. I was like “Wow!” I think with us musicians, especially when you’re on tour, you don’t ever think that music is profound and it heals people. We just play and often times it gets monotonous. It’s a job and you have to go on tour and you have to go to an airport, hotel, and find a place to eat; so it gets monotonous. So with him telling me that, it really took me out of my own complaints about what I do. Like this is really worthwhile; it really makes a difference. Someone named Patricia just shared with me, (I don’t know if she’s here; there you are) she shared with me, how easy someone’s birth was made just by a mix of music they had made. Isn’t that right? So I am sure there’s a whole lot of stories just like that. But music is vital. And one thing that is amazing about music is that it can be used for anything. It is a tool so you can use music to make people feel good, you can use music to heal them, likewise, you can use music to upset people. To make them feel very angry, to make them feel sad. You can make music that will make people go to war. So that’s the power of music; so we have to make sure it is in the right hands. I know someone was telling me he was a Special Forces soldier in Panama and you might remember in Panama, they were trying to get Noriega and he was telling me that one of the tools they would use was that they would blare heavy metal music really loud. I am sure you have heard that the military does that; they blare really obnoxious music. They do that with anyone they want to upset.

So all that to say, music is really powerful. Well I’ll play another tune. This is another original tune. This one is called Love is More Precious than Gold. It’s on a record coming out in May of this year. My latest record. [Plays song: The grass is high. Full up with king snakes. Better watch your step every path you take. Heads up from the black snakes when you ache, the cane breaks. Go tell you brother. Got to tell your sister too. I will walk through fire, yeah baby, baby just to get to you. In the book it says, who gon’ get through the door? It don’t matter if you rich. Sure don’t matter if you poor. With your Cuban links or your diamonds or gold. For less than that, who cares about our cold? Not me. Love is like the darkest wing covered in silver. Your love’s more precious than gold. More precious than gold. Have you seen Rox City next to Ruby Falls? Some people say it aint pretty, but they got no sense at all. See the pimps got the pole. The count they dimes. Dipped in fabulous furs, I see rocks that could be mine. But love is like a dove with a wing, covered in silver. Your love’s more precious than gold.]

I’ve known of musicians who have been diagnosed with a chronic illness and say I’m just going to keep playing. There’s a well-known band, some of the younger people might have heard of them, called Wide Spread Panic, really popular. And maybe two or three years ago, their guitarist was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I forget his name. And they said he had like six months to live and so he just kept going until the very end. Right now, a friend of mine is very ill with cancer, named Gatemouth Brown. Gatemouth is very well-known from the old school, R&B, blues, swing, guitar player and he says he’s foregoing treatment and he’s going to just keep playing. So there’s got to be something about music as a way to keep you going. As a way to extend your life, as a way to bring some sort of positivity into your realm. Lastly, there’s a person I got to know through my work with the Moscore Scazy documentary. A man named Otha Turner who came from Mississippi. And when I met Mr. Turner he was about eighty-eight years old and the last time I saw him, he was about ninety-four. And when he was ninety-four, he lived on a farm. He would get up at five in the morning, just like he had done his whole life, and he would work on the farm until lunchtime. And then he would take off. I guess now he is taking his time now, he is old. But he was getting up at five in the morning and he lived strong. And that’s an interesting story because I was due to record a record with Mr. Turner on the 18th of February 2002. And he died a week before we had the session. How it went down was that he had a daughter named Bernice that he had played with for many years and Bernice had been struggling with cancer for several years. And right about maybe two weeks before he passed, she succumbed and went to the hospital. And then shortly thereafter she went into a coma so he knew that his daughter was going. And then all of a sudden he just up and got pneumonia and died. Both were admitted in the same hospital. And they say that he died in the morning and she died in the evening because he didn’t want her to precede him. So there’s definitely something about that.

When you look at chords, it’s funny because the more I study about music and any musicians who know music can attest to this, minor and major are almost the same thing. It just depends on which chord you are using. Like for example, this is a D minor seventh chord [plays notes on guitar] but if I wanted to play an F sixth chord [plays notes on guitar], that’s harmonically the same the same as a D minor seventh chord. Now technically, this D minor seventh should make you feel sad and this F sixth should make you feel happy. But it’s all relative. And likewise, as I say it’s all relative, the chords should have their relative majors and minors in music. So if you playing C major as a musician, you know that you can use A minor to put in a minor chord and make it sound like it is still major. And there’s a lot of folksongs like that [plays short excerpt of a folksong]. When you are dealing with blues, you have the opportunity to make it seem more emotive just because of the way the blues is. There’s a lot of mimicking of the human voice and cries and hollers and that sort of thing. But in general, I found the more I play music, it’s all really relative and it just depends on how you organize things.

I guess also I’d like to touch on the idea that to us Americans, blues is a really old form of music. But if you measure it up against other musical traditions, it’s very recent. They say 1903 W.D. Handy was in Mississippi and he saw someone playing the blues and then he said let me write for the blues and then came blues bands. But before that you had spirituals, gospel actually did not come about until about when the blues was born, around the 20s. Before that you had spirituals. Before that you had work song. Before that you had African music. And you also had European music, which you can find in jazz to some extent in ragtime. But in general, that’s the wellspring that it comes from. But I’d like to talk a little bit about the blues as lamentation. To me the blues is nothing but lamentation just talking about, like we said before, something that bother you and a way to get it out so you can feel better about it. I’ll play a tune that is sort of like a sensual tune but when you hear it, it’s like kind of a dark, almost a voodooist, spooky tune. It’s called Catfish Blues written by a man named Robert Patway but Muddy Waters and Jimi Hendrix and them popularized it. But this is one of these chords and these airs that evoke a feeling. This is an E seven chord. There are different ways to play and E seven chord. [Plays the E chord various ways]. They all sound different, but for our purposes, we’ll play it this way. [Plays song: Well I wish I was a captain. In the low, deep, blue sea. Come and get me. Fishing after me. Fishing after me. Fishing after me. Be a son of a gun. I went to my baby house and I sit down on her step she said come lay down, my young man. Old man just lay. Well there’s two trains running. Aint ever going my way. Just for a day. Just for a day.]

There’s a song I’d like to play for you. A song made famous by one of my heroes, a man named Paul Robeson who I am sure you are familiar with. And this tune he recorded actually on the telephone. I think it was the first recording where the vocalist was separated by an ocean from the actual band. The reason being, many of you may remember, he ran into trouble with the House Un-American Activities Committee during the whole McCarthy thing and they took away his passport. Paul Robeson was very renounced overseas for his singing and he had an engagement in Wales and so he couldn’t go so he telephoned in. This is like early 1950s. And they have it on the CD. And it’s amazing that had technology back then to do that. But this is a tune; real nice gospel tune. [Plays song: Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? Why not ever a man? Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? Why not ever a man? He delivered Daniel from the lion’s den. Jonah from the belly of a whale. And all of God’s children from the fire, why not ever a man. Hallelujah. Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? Why not ever a man?