The daddy's Got the Blues and He Can't Help Hisself

"I’m just getting started and I hope I can continue to make music that will connect with people. These days people need the blues more than ever…takes your mind off other things."
--Lurrie Bell

So the daddy is sitting in his living room in his comfortable home. But he remembers when it wasn't always so. He remembers when he first came to Minneapolis, Minnesota and washed dishes at a local restaurant for food and a place to stay. And then, like a slap upside the head, the words of Chicago blues guitarist Mighty Joe Young (He played for R&B great Tyrone Davis and was also a side man to blues greats Jimmie Dawkins and Otis Rush, respectively) rises up from some place deep in his soul; and the daddy begins to sing:

"Nothing in my pocket but the bottom.
More than I can say for my shoe.
Speaking of the blues I got em.
That's all I can afford to lose.
You know I need,
yes, I need someone.
Oh, before you reach the end.
You, too, might need a friend."

To shake this feeling, the daddy goes for a walk and...BAM!...gets hit again like Toni Soprano whacks a mafia underling on a late Sunday night, in the middle of some dark woods, somewhere outside New Jersey. This time it's Lurrie Bell singing a slow blues with a heavy back beat and a bitter-sweet tone of resignation, asking someone but no one in particular:

"What can a poor man do
you know, when the blues keeps following him around?
What can a poor man do
you know, when the blues keeps following him around?
Get him a pint a liquor
sit and drink it on down.

You know sometimes I feel
like drinking me some gasoline.
Oh, sometimes I feel
like drinking me some gasoline.
Striking me a match
and blow my fool self up in steam."

Let's face it: the daddy's got the blues, and, like an addict who has reached rock bottom, he just can't help hisself.

So what does a shaking addict do when he needs a fix? Call the nearest chemical dependency agency and say "I was wondering if you could possibly provide me some assistance?" Please. He goes to a drug dealer, gets a vile of crack and
retires to the nearest dark alley to seek a little release, a little peace, with the only God he knows.

So what did the daddy do to get his fix ? He went to a record shop, copped "Let's Talk About Love" by legendary blues guitar genius Lurrie Bell, sat in his SUV, his personal alley, and got some cathartic release, if only for a day, from the blues that keeps following him around.

"Let's Talk About Love" is honest blues. There's not a lot of loud, fast playing tunes that provide little time to breathe and take it all in. Lurrie takes his time and settles into a groove and plays on the beat just the way his father, Carey Bell, a great harmonica player, used to do it back in the day in Muddy Water's band.

In his playing, Lurrie takes clean breaks and steadily builds on a solo like a bricklayer building a house. But this is not to say the brother doesn't rock. He gets you patting your feet and dancing in the bathroom with several tunes spread appropriately throughout the CD. What it says is that, whether a shuffle or down-and-out-somebody-spare-a-dime wail, Lurrie and his red Gibson moans and soars and screams inside a soulful backbeat that will make you feel it all over-- feel it to your bones.

But the daddy especially loves Lurrie's rhythm playing on "Why Am I Treated So Bad?" and his stirring solo on "Missing You;" And if you got a chance to see the December 2007 Living Blues magazine article on Lurrie Bell, you would understand why. You see, besides battling alcohol, Lurrie has battled a mental disease (schizophrenia) as well. And just when he was getting over it, just when this genius of the blues guitar was starting to wield his axe all over Chicago again, his loving partner and then his mentoring father died. So suddenly he's left to take care of his child and his life alone. And the sound of his red Gibson tells you that the blues still follows him around-- that it's been a struggle, that it still is a struggle.

On the other hand, his honest soul searching and truth-telling with his voice and with his "amen" and "I hear you" response on that red Gibson is one of the reasons the daddy sometimes turns away from other music and plays nothing but the blues for months.

Poet Sterling Plumpp said of Bell:

"He speaks scared chords
a guitar screams in his
eyes. Because he is some
one shot out of a shot
gun house by white
lightning that makes him
a.c.h.a. high
rise resident...
He is a part of speech
therapy we master
to speak sanity"

Has the blues ever followed you around?
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