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Satan and Adam
albums
Harlem Blues
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Mother Mojo
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Living on the River (Reviews)
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If That Don't Bring Her Back
By Adam Gussow
I sent my baby a
brand-new twenty-dollar bill
If that don't bring
her back, I'm darn sure my shotgun will.
—John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson
Nobody actually knew what had
happened to Nat. One moment he was the crown prince of New
York's downtown blues scene, double-parking his cab in front of
Dan Lynch's Blues Bar on Sunday afternoons, striding indoors
with a harmonica in hand to blow chorus after squalling chorus
at the weekly jam sessions; the next moment he was gone, fled
South to his father's or sister's in Norfolk or Newport News.
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He'd been shot in the
chest on the corner of Thirteenth Street and Second
Avenue, just down the block from Lynch's.
That was the only fact
everybody seemed to agree on. The guy who shot him was
either a drug dealer or a jealous lover or pimp
connected to Doreen, Nat's brilliant white girlfriend, a
prostitute and junkie. Nat had either been yelling at
Doreen or slapping her around or both. The shooting
wasn't supposed to have happened--Nat was too smart, too
generous, too self-disciplined--and yet it seemed fated.
Everybody who knew him was shocked; nobody was
surprised. Nat Riddles would go get himself shot, and
disappear. He'd
be back. He always came back, after the stories people
told had had a chance to swell and ripen. |
Some Sunday afternoon when the jam session was flying
high he'd shoulder back through the swinging doors of Dan Lynch,
flash his dazzling smile, bear-hug ten or twelve dear old
friends, yell out to Chuck Hancock on the bandstand, kiss Karola
and Diana at the bar—"I love it!" he'd say as a cold
Heineken found its way into his hand, "I love
it!"—and stand there beaming as Chuck's alto sax screamed,
honked, and snarled. Nat was back! He'd been president of the
student government at Long Island University, a Tae Kwon Do
adept, a trophy-winning disco dancer, a graphic artist at Pratt.
He'd freebased cocaine in the days before crack. He was
perpetually on the verge of becoming the blues world's Next Big
Thing. A young black harp-player with the Sound. White guys who
loved blues couldn't get enough of him. "Nat!" they'd
yell. "Hey, Nat!" He called all waitresses
"darling" and made the older ones melt where they
stood. He was my master. One of two.
We met on a cold April night
in 1985. The lovelorn neighborhood harmonica player--recent
dropout from the graduate English program at Columbia--had just
made his big-stage debut on the steps of Hamilton Hall, where
three hundred sitters-in protesting the university's investment
policies in South Africa were being entertained by various
campus bands. A Marine Band harp blown through a large outdoor
P.A. system ruled the world. I was bopping home down Amsterdam
Avenue, lost in the sound of my own notes decaying as they
spiraled up and collected under the wallway between the Law
School and Philosophy Hall. Bird was my model: sweet, angular,
endlessly unfolding lines.
A yellow cab heading uptown
passed me, slowed, then hung a U-turn and pulled up to the curb.
The driver leaned over and rolled down the passenger-side
window. He was older than me but not much, and black. He smiled
as if we knew each other.
"Was that you?" he asked.
"You mean playing just now?"
"Yeah."
I shrugged. "I was noodling."
"It sounded nice. I thought I oughta see
who the hell you were."
Still leaning on his elbow, he
flipped open a tool kit sitting next to him on the front seat.
The trays were cluttered with harmonicas, cables, a ball
microphone.
"You play?" I said.
"I've been accused of
that more than once." His smile was a promise, an
effortless seduction. He selected a harp, cupped it beautifully
with enfolding hands, and stared at me as he played, eyes
narrowing slightly as he bore down. I stood at the open window,
struck dumb. The gods had blessed me with another visitation. I
blinked in the glare outside Plato's cave. The records I'd been
listening to--Little Walter, James Cotton, Junior Wells, my old
high school collection--were mere shadows of the true and
beautiful.
"Shit," I said.
"You like that?"
He shut off the engine, got
out of the cab, came around front, set his open toolbox on the
hood.
"You've got the music in
you," he said, selecting another harp. "All you need
are a few of the subtleties."
We stood on the corner
of 118th Street and Amsterdam in the cold wind for forty
minutes while he recapitulated the stylistic evolution
of American blues harmonica. John Lee Williamson--the
first Sonny Boy, not to be confused with Rice
Miller--was our honored forefather. You wanna build a
mansion, you gotta pour some concrete. Little Walter and
Junior Wells were blowing straight John Lee stuff before
amplifiers came along and shook everything up.Kim Wilson of the Fabulous
Thunderbirds is an awesome motherfucker and blows some shit that
would spin your head. Not to mention Sugar Blue, the baddest
street blues harmonica player ever to come out of New York.
"Man," he said,
"Sugar used to walk the streets with his head down,
practicing, and he was always high. I mean always. And he was
the only player I've ever seen who could stop a street full of
people dead with his playing, just like that. Set his little
amplifier on the sidewalk, plug in, and go. Diddleyotten rebop,
wabba dabba doobop! They wouldn't throw no change, either. I'm
talking bills-- ones, fives, tens, fluttering through the air. A
whole blockful of people, man. Taxicabs would pull over,
women--beautiful women, gorgeous women, luscious women--would
stop dead in their tracks. That was Sugar. I ain't tellin' you
no lies. He was always practicing, too. Every time you'd see him
he'd be walking down the street with his finger in his ear,
figuring things out."
The cold finally chilled us.
He gave me his card before he went. Nat Riddles, Harmonica
for All Occasions.
Source:
Random
House * * *
* * Satan and Adam albums:
Harlem Blues
/
Mother Mojo /
Living on the River (Reviews)* * * * *
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Adam Gussow is assistant
professor of English and southern studies at the University of
Mississippi. He is the author of Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues
Memoir and has been a professional blues harmonica player for many
years, touring widely in the 1990s a s part of the Harlem-based duo
Satan and Adam.
MR. SATAN is Sterling
Magee, legendary Harlem guitarist and songwriter who has performed and
recorded with James Brown, King Curtis, Etta James, George Benson,
Willis "Gatortail" Jackson, and others. |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
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Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
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