The Guitar Genius of Rev. Gary Davis

Ian Zack, Say No To The Devil, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2015

Ian Zack’s biography of Reverend Gary Davis is an outstanding  work – meticulously researched, thoroughly engaging and readable and written with great affection and sympathy. Zack clearly recognizes the enormous talent that Davis was, noting with some disappointment and incredulity that Rolling Stone magazine had no room for him in its list of 100 greatest guitarists. The omission beggars belief, given the personal influence that Davis had on a generation of guitarist through his teaching, and the way that his songs were covered by major rock groups like the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead.

Zack notes the comments of blues singer Larry Johnson after Davis’s death in 1972: “I admired him most for, first of all he being born blind, in the South, black, had everything against him. Everything. Nothing did he have in his favour. And he managed  to become a master musician. And then he managed to influence other musicians from here to England. And I think for him to do that, even to keep a mind good enough to do that, is something else.”

Zack carefully traces for us the contours of Davis’s life from his early days in South Carolina to the streets of New York City, where he was eventually to be recognized for the musical genius that he was. Davis stayed faithful to his calling as a minister of the gospel until he died and only in the last decade of his life was he persuaded to sing blues songs publically. Zack does not ignore Davis’s failings or the inconsistencies with his Christian ministry– his drinking, his periodic womanizing or the lewd lyrics of some of his blues material (mostly privately sung). But at the same time he doesn’t dwell on these and focuses instead on the enormous generosity of Davis and his wife, Gary Davis’s insistence for most of his life on being first of all a minister of the gospel and his immense musical talent.

It is, at times, a heart rending story, as we see Davis cope with his blindness, battle poverty virtually all his life and struggle to be appreciated during his lifetime for the amazing artist and guitarist that he was. It is inspiring as well, though as we come to understand, with one of his pupils, Larry Bezer, that “He faced adversity eyeball to eyeball and never blinked.”

Ian Zack has given us a wonderful gift in this biography – it deserves to be widely read and acclaimed. He sums up Rev. Gary Davis as follows:

“In truth, Davis was uncommonly giving, spiritual, tenacious beyond the most usual conceptions of the word, funny, charming, quick-witted, and, or course, profoundly gifted. But he was also cocky, competitive, sinful, and at times unfaithful to the religious virtues he sang about so mightily. His music, one might say, was profoundly aspirational, and if he sometimes fell short of a commandment or two, the only one he had to answer to was God.”

Father’s Day

Is your dad a music fan? If so, then, here’s your Father’s Day present sorted!

Here’s what Michael C. Bailey said in his review in All ABout Jazz:

“Burnett considers the blues backwards 2000 years through a prism of Christian Practice. His focus is less the place of Christianity within the perspective of the blues as the blues as a metaphor of dislocation, loss, forgiveness, and salvation. The social and cultural circumstances that gave rise to the rich land in the Mississippi Delta has been played out many times. It is an archetype: a persecuted minority endures the injustice of a class-ridden society, ultimately ending as refugees and exiles in and out of their own lands. The parallel with the Old Testament and mid-Twentieth Century Jews cannot be overstated. The early Christians in Rome are another example. The Psalms have as their progeny the blues of the Delta region. These are songs expressing the range of emotions experienced not only because life is hard, but because it is made harder by others.

Burnett injects the concepts of justice and endurance into the comparative discussion making a convincing argument for the temporal relationship between The Beatitudes and the whole corpus of Delta blues. Burnett’s is a keen cultural analysis occurring at a high emotional and intellectual level. This book is for anyone interested in the blues as a part of the civilization that grew out of Christianity. The pertinence is plain regardless of what religious or anti-religious winds happen to be blowing. History is history, let us learn from it.”

  The Gospel According to the Blues by Gary W Burnett

Rosewood

In 1923, Rosewood was a thriving African American community in Florida. In January of that year, a white woman named Fannie Taylor from neighbouring Sumner claimed that a black man had assaulted her. Her black maid’s view was that no such attack had taken place and that the only visitor to the house on the day in question was Fannie’s white lover. Fannie’s motive was to deflect her husband’s attention from the affair.

In due course, four hundred Ku Klux Klan members, who had gathered nearby for a rally, joined the husband in the search for the alleged perpetrator, combing the area with tracking dogs.  It was assumed to be a recently escaped convict named Jesse Hunter who was hiding in Rosewood at the time. In addition two other innocent men were deemed to be accomplices and the mob lynched one and imprisoned the other. Sylvester Carrier, a cousin of the man beaten and imprisoned gathered his extended family together, many of them children, into his home for protection. A mob duly arrived and kicked the door in.

In a stand-off which lasted for hours, a number of people were killed and injured, including at least 6 black people and a child who had been shot in the eye. Two white members of the attacking mob also died, and as a result of that, the mob proceeded to burn the town of Rosewood to the ground, forcing black families to flee, many of them hiding in the swamps for days to escape the mobs.

Overall we do not know exactly how many people died in the massacre – it may have been as many as 30 black people. As we might expect in this era, a special grand jury set up to investigate the incident found there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone, although many years later, in 1994, the Florida Legislature recognised injustice of the incident and passed the Rosewood Bill which entitled the nine survivors to compensation. In 2004, Florida put up a heritage landmark describing the Rosewood Massacre and naming the victims.

The incident was the subject of a movie in 1997 by John Singleton.

Blues troubadour Eric Bibb commemorates this terrible incident in a song on his new album, Blues People, called simply Rosewood. Speaking  in a recent interview, Bibb said he felt the song was a reminder of work to be done, given the racial tensions and injustices that have surface prominently of late in the United States. “There’s a lot of work to be done,” he said. “1923 doesn’t really feel that far away in lieu of these recent events.”

(Check out Eric Bibb’s interview here).