Many thanks to RIAA, DiMA and USTA for sponsoring a fantastic reception last night on Capitol Hill featuring one of my blues idols, Buddy Guy. I've seen him perform a half-dozen times, twice (if I recall correctly) at Wolf Trap and several times with the headliners at his Chicago club, Buddy Guy's Legends, a South Side joint I stop at every single time I'm in Chicago. (One time I was there on Buddy's birthday and his staff gave him a huge sheet cake; imagine my surprise a few minutes later when a huge bouncer handed me a piece.) But last night I was close enough to him while he performed I could have reached over and put on his purple hat.

FYI, only click to the jump if any of the above is of any interest to you.

I've heard a lot of great music on Capitol Hill over the last two decades; most recently I heard som songwriters perform their own compositions at an event sponsored by the Congressional Songwriters' Caucus, organized by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Songwriters Guild of America chief Rick Carnes. One recurring theme can be found at all of these events, though; people talk over the performers. At the songwriters event, one took the situation in hand by walking through the crowd, unplugged guitar in hand, forcing people to stop their ever-so-critical conversations for a moment to listen. Buddy's getting up there in years and the room was a little packed to pull off something like that, but he was forced to stop a soft song midway through and take it up-tempo and louder. That still didn't shut up the networkers but it meant the thirty or so of us around the stage trying to enjoy the show could hear him.

Far be it from me to tell Washingtonians not to network; that would be like trying to tell a shark to stop swimming. But the reception went a full hour before Buddy came on; couldn't all business cards have been exchanged during that time? Why go to a concert if you're going to ignore the artist?

On another note, I brought my 11-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son. They actually went to Buddy before, at Wolf Trap, which also featured my daughter's favorite artist, blues mistress Susan Tedeschi. A number of people who actually wanted to hear the blues called me a "cool dad' for bringing them, but the kids have been exposed to blues since birth; I mentioned my daughter likes blues women, and my son has artists like Cab Calloway on his new iPod. I will say there were more than a few moments where I thought I was a "bad dad" given the fact that pretty much everything Buddy was singing was sexual in nature. However, unlike urban music, blues composers take great pride in spelling out their spicier language through clever turns of phrase and double entendres. As a result, I'm pretty sure my daughter missed most of the references; my son wasn't paying much attention to the lyrics.

Buddy asked us to do our part to encourage more blues appreciation, to get it to the point where he can hear Muddy Waters on the radio (actually, sometimes I hear Don Imus do a parody of a Muddy Waters song on his show). I don't know if we're going to get to that point, but when I mentioned his plea to my wife, she said, "That's what satellite radio is for." Or services like Napster-to-Go, where I download hundreds of random blues songs and then listen to what I've caught. My love for blues may never become mainstream, but I like having offbeat interests.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 11:06 AM | Art

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