In this home of blues

Like oil or crawfish or Mardi Gras, the blues in Louisiana seems less a product of our own manufacturing and more like a natural resource carried by weary feet stomping on dusty floorboards, mighty hands bending time-weathered strings, venerable voices howling down the hallways of memory. 

Now, people like to talk about Mississippi, about B.B. King, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, but here in Louisiana, we don’t even have to get started on New Orleans before Baton Rouge can counter with late greats like Slim Harpo, Lightnin’ Slim and Lead Belly—he wrote “Good Night, Irene” inside Angola—and of course Henry Gray and Tabby Thomas, still going strong in their 80s.

As a kid, when I thought of listening to the blues, pressing Play felt unnervingly like walking through the doors of a museum.

To the uninitiated like myself, I heard each lick and “baby” as a relic, a found art object dusted off, hung on a wall, encased in glass, frozen in time.

Dun-dannah-dun-dun—you know that riff. We all know it.

It says, I’m down. My woman left me. The world done me wrong. But this guitar is gonna show ’em all.

Okay. But then what?

“How has it changed?” I used to ask. “What’s exciting?”

Certainly, there is a class of modern blues artists devoted to evolving the genre by blending it with new influences and fresh ideas. Many consider local Grammy winner Chris Thomas King to be chief among them. So, even if the blues has to change, Baton Rouge still has an all-star in the game.

In the early 1960s, that change agent was Buddy Guy. His iconic, electrified Chicago Blues sound came from the barrooms and dancehalls of our city, where Guy worked the conveyor belt in a beer-bottling factory, where he kept the LSU campus clean by day and pumped gas night after night.

In Baton Rouge, Guy listened to Guitar Slim’s “The Things I Used to Do” constantly. Produced in New Orleans by Ray Charles, the song was a rare R&B hit from the era in that it caught fire in the South and the North when most popular songs of the day were only regional hits. When Guy arrived in Chicago, players there knew Slim’s song just as well as Guy did. The music connected them like a cord.

Guy brought our blues to Chicago, then to rock ’n’ roll. And yet, what remains most distinctive about Guy’s blues descendants is that they hold within them the same righteous spirit and unbreakable connective tissue that echoes a wellspring of longing and perseverance to listeners who recognize the same ache inside themselves.

That connection brings hope.

“Even when the blues is sad, it turns your sadness to joy,” Guy writes on the final page of his new autobiography, When I Left Home: My Story. “And ain’t that a beautiful thing?”

Indeed.

The blues is not a museum. It’s a home. Not for analysis, but for catharsis.

Some will call rap or R&B the modern blues, and that’s okay. But even if changing the blues is what we, at times, may want, it is not what we actually need. The blues, real blues, should never change.

We need the blues the most just the way it is.