Music and the City
"LEARNIN' THE BLUES"
When I was a little girl, my family took me to see B.B. King perform a free concert in downtown Chicago. I was about four years old but this wasn’t my first concert by any means. It wasn’t even my first B.B. King concert either.
One of my fond memories of childhood was growing up in a house full of music. Everyone kind of liked the same things but had their own preferences too. Some Saturday afternoons there was a different type of music playing in almost every other room of my grandparent’s house.
So it wasn’t unusual for me to be in the crowd watching B.B. King and his trusted guitar “Lucille” break each other’s hearts over and over again in every song. But we were up front at this particular show, and I guess it did seem unusual to B.B. King to have such a young blues fan front and center. Between songs, B.B. talked about how some audience members might not know what “the blues” was because they were too young. And he gestured to me and explained that if I were to see a doll in the store window that I wanted, but my mother told me she didn’t have enough money to buy it for me, then THAT sadness I’d feel WAS the blues.
As Michael Corleone would say, “That’s a true story.” And I’m lucky; not many kids get to learn about the blues from the man himself, the blues legend – B.B. King.
Today, my musical interests are still an amassment of everything from Buddy Guy to Bon Jovi, and Bach to Billy Holiday. The blues still means as much to me as some of my rocker favorites. But you don’t need to play the blues to feel the blues. Any CD I pull out of my cabinet is likely to have one of “those songs” on it. You know the ones I’m talking about. A song that brings you right back to something that hurt, or something that felt good – but hurts you to think of it now in retrospect.
There’s a reason why music is used in almost all cultures and religious ceremonies, spanning the globe and our known timeline. It moves us; and on a level, I believe, deeper than any other creative art form.
I was 10 years old with a fever of 103 when I first went to the opera. Bundled up like only adults can subject their kids to in the winter, I stubbornly refused to be left at home despite my cold and fever. I slept through most of the opera…except when Pavarotti sang. That amazing voice sending a chill down my spine and making my heart ache. Many years and said fever aside, I can still feel those chills.
Then when I hear Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” I’m suddenly back in that dingy bar, staring up at the bassist I was gaga for, as he dedicated that song to me.
Bon Jovi’s “Wild Is The Wind” puts me back on a bus on cold, cold Chicago winter mornings on my way to a job I hated.
Journey’s “Lights” reminds me of the walking through the fog again from my first visit to San Francisco.
That old song by .38 Special renews the pang of the day my uncle died:
“Since you’ve been gone…I feel my life slipping away…”And “Trying” by Lifehouse and “Always” by Saliva both pour salt into the still tender wound from the last time my heart was broken.
Some people say that mathematics is the language of God. If that’s true, then music must be the pneuma that saturates our souls.
I tend to think that songs are ghosts. And we all have some that haunt us.
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