When we are met with the abject Blues failures of fail-safe luminaries like Eric Clapton and Cyndi Lauper — getting a fresh breath of the Blues with 16-year-old Andy Poxon — is just the tonic we need to keep on skiffling.
Gregor Hilden is one of those Bluesman who — once you hear a single chord he plays — forever owns your sense of what’s good and your definition of what makes The Blues intrinsically real and beautifully human. I’ve never met Greg proper, but I feel as if I’ve known him forever — merely because I drink in his daily GregsGuitars videos on YouTube. Four days ago, I couldn’t bear my secret delight in his talent any longer, and I posted my very first comment on a video in my long history of using YouTube:
I recently quit the correcting game and stopped correcting people out loud when they made mistakes. SuperGenius David Boles suggested that I should write down the errors and blog about them since stoppering them internally would do me no good. Without further ado, please enjoy the following corrections — For The Record…
Our behavior contradicts our best intentions. We say one thing, but mean another. We tell our children not to drink while we not only drink, but drive. We live the Holy Realm on the weekend while we live in the purposeful, yet uncanny, ethical grime of our daily debacle the rest of the week. Recently, I argued that all children must be kept at home until at least the age of 27:
When I watched Forrest Gump navigating a boat and catching hundreds of pounds of fish, I never once thought to myself that it was completely unrealistic for Tom Hanks to portray a shrimp boat captain because he was not a shrimp boat captain. Nor did I have a problem with Gary Sinise as a lieutenant who lost his legs in Vietnam injury — even though I knew fully well that Gary’s legs were perfectly fine. Why, then, does Ramin Setoodeh of Newsweek insist that a gay man cannot convincingly play a straight character?
B.J. Reagon — Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon — is one of those rare SuperGenius talents that cannot be boxed in by mind or musical genre. Is she a Blues singer? Is she a Gospel singer? Is she a Folk singer?
If you have an ounce of talent for the guitar, you are wildly in awe of just how much Jimi Hendrix achieved in his brilliant, brief, Supernova life.
There have been so many remixes and rebundlings of Jimi’s music since his death, but few people are aware of Jimi Hendrix’s fantastic “Blues” album that is filled with the most incredible history of sound in our shared memory.
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