July 15, 2015 Article

The Old Coot is singing the Blues.

By Merlin Lessler

I was at the Black Cat Gallery in Owego the other night, sipping free wine, munching on cheese and crackers, listening to folk music played by two talented women, one from Vestal, the other from candor, and gazing at the art and craft work. It was the first Friday of the month and that means “Art Walk” with stores staying open late and special arts and talent displayed throughout the Owego Marketplace. It’s a real treat, especially for an old coot like me. Did I mention free wine?

So there I was, freeloading yet again and getting in the way of legitimate shoppers. I gazed at a sepia picture of Robert Leroy Johnson, an itinerant blues singer and guitar player of the 1930’s whose records were reissued in the 1950’s, twenty some years after his death at age 27 in 1938. Those 78 RPM records, not only establish his credentials as an exceptional guitar player and song writer, they are also credited with the birth of rock and roll, from the days of Elvis right through to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones; they all took their cue from, and credit him, with greatly influencing their own works. 

This was all news to me. A Vestal schoolteacher standing next to me explained the history. I shouldn’t mention her name, but I will anyhow, as I always do; it was Karen Liberatore. It got me thinking about the hardship that drove people to create the blues: poverty, personal tragedy, bias, prejudice, and lack of educational and employment opportunities. What would drive the blues today if it were in the hands of middle class Americans?

“Cell phone blues,” might be one such dirge to come into creation, a lament from a teen whose parents limited his monthly data allocation to 3,000 mega bytes on a non-state of the art, 3-year-old Samsung cell phone. Or, “Stick shift blues,” from a girl whose father made her learn to drive on a standard transmission car with 150,000 mile on the odometer. “Latté blues,” would come from a teen whose mom limited her latté budget to two a week.

These modern blues wouldn’t be limited to teens, who are always an easy target for old coots like me; we constantly compare their life style to the hard times we grew up in. The “walk to school up hill, both ways” kind of thing. We’d create our blues music too. “Social Security Blues,” moaning about the Administration changing the date my monthly check from the seventeenth of the month to the third Wednesday, causing it to come as late as the 21^st in some months. Or, “The early-bird Special blues,” a lament about restaurants reducing the cut off from 5 PM to 4:30 PM. The same places that have wised up and removed the unlimited supply of Splenda and sugar packets from their tables, forcing us to buy our own instead of stocking up while we dined.

No, the blues wouldn’t have the same driving force that created them in the 20’s and 30’s. “My Roth IRA only earned 4% last year” just doesn’t have the same impact. Johnson would probably fall out of his chair laughing if he heard our laments. Especially those from my old coot crowd whose favorite hobby is to moan the blues and complain about virtually everything. Fortunately we can’t carry a tune; the blues genre is safe!