![]() ![]() Here, as elsewhere that summer - in Avignon, Cannes, Florence - the featured images are Americans in dark sunglasses: Tom Cruise in Risky Business, Ackroyd and Belushi in The Blues Brothers.ġ985: Nat Riddles, my harmonica teacher, is a black New Yorker, thirty-three to my twenty-seven, a legend in local blues circles. Later, bonded and brimming, shoulders bumping as our jeans pockets bulge, we stroll back through the Quartier Beaubourg past caricature artists at their folding tables and poster-and-t-shirt shops. A scattering of bills and change flutters down. He sets his open guitar case on the cobblestones and begins strumming I wail. ![]() I begin as a solo busker, then accumulate a guitar-man: Jakob, from Denmark. There, in front of the Pompidou Center on a sunny June morning two days after leaving Manhattan, my life veers in a new direction. I’m not sure why, but Canada seems like a strange place for the blues.ġ984: Heartbroken but weirdly euphoric after my live-in girlfriend of five years has abandoned me at spring term’s end for one of our fellow English grad students at Columbia, I toss a handful of harmonicas in my backpack and jet off to Paris with a grad school pal and a thick orange copy of Let’s Go Europe ’84. Whammer jammer bass tab plus#Plus King Biscuit Boy by a harmonica player named Richard Newell, from Canada. King and Bobby Bland’s Together Again…Live The Butterfield Blues Band’s Golden Butter, James Cotton’s 100% Cotton The Climax Blues Band’s FM/Live (“Let’s work together!”) John Mayall’s Movin’ On featuring a jazz trumpet player named Blue Mitchell. I buy Heavy Cream, which has “Sunshine of Your Love” and “Crossroads,” and In Concert, a live album by Derek and the Dominos, and a welter of other record albums featuring photos and drawings of white men and black men - grimacing as they squeeze the guitar strings, or smiling in a relaxed way, or posed like rock stars, impossibly cool and famous. Both albums were recorded in England Clapton, who backs up Wolf as well as Williamson, also plays incredible lead guitar with Cream and Derek and the Dominos, I soon discover. “Bye Bye Bird” and “Little Red Rooster” speak to me. I manage to find two records featuring harmonica players Glover discusses in his book, older black men who sing all the songs on both albums: Eric Clapton and the Yardbirds Live with Sonny Boy Williamson and The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions. ![]()
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