GRACE IN THE BLUES - MEMORY OF OTIS SPANN
It was 1966 in Chicago and I was a young guitar player wanting to start a blues band. I had a friend who played bass well enough. Then we met a drummer and additional guitarist at Central YMCA Community College, which I attended for a couple of semesters (also one of Michael Bloomfield’s alma maters!).
We’d jammed at one of our houses a few times, it sounded ok and then the drummer said he knew the owner of a popular blues club on Wells Street in Old Town, “Mother Blues” and he was able to get us permission from the owner, Richard Harding, to rehearse there, where we could spread out in a larger space.
We arrived mid-afternoon on a Saturday and set up. We began to play and it was soon evident the other guitarist was quite good. He and I traded solos during each song. Each time, he played faster and flashier. This is sometimes called “cutting,” basically when someone plays to show that he is better than the other person.
At first I felt inadequate and tried to compete with his fancy guitar work. But finally I gave up and just played what occurred to me without trying real hard.
Then unexpectedly I hit a groove that many musicians know. It is as if grace descends from above and the instrument is playing itself, is singing, and you are just there in the flow – much like how athletes describe playing in the “zone”. I was then indeed a humble witness to what my fingers were doing and the music that was pouring forth. The guitar was making a long, slow, very song-like stream of blues melodies that flowed into each other and it felt like they could go on forever.
As I played on in this altered state, a number of musicians walked in. I glance up to look. It was Muddy Waters and his band! I had forgotten they were the band to play that night when the club opened.
I continued in my groove, not completely distracted, but then I heard a piano. I looked back and saw that Otis Spann, Muddy Water’s famous piano player, had sat down and was playing behind me.
I immediately was humbled and started just playing rhythm chords to back him up. But he looked at me, gestured and said smiling,
“You go ‘head on.”
So I continued with the fluid, inspired melodies, accompanied by Otis Spann’s beautiful playing and eventually wrapped up the song.
We soon finished the rehearsal with the excitement of having the honor to have played in front of these famous bluesmen.
We’d packed up and were about to leave. The owner, Richard Harding, came up to me and asked if we were indeed going to be forming a band. I said I thought so. He said as long as I was playing with them he wanted to book us.
Then he said, “Do you know what just happened?”
I said, “No.”
He said, “When a great old bluesman sits down with you and insists on backing you up - that’s a blues initiation. It doesn’t get any more formal than that.”
Of course, I was transported by what he said. Between the transcendent intoxication of playing with Otis Spann, the presence of Muddy Waters and his band, and now the realization of a blues initiation, I was then in and walked out in a heavenly state of heart and mind.
As it turns out, rather than that being a moment where I began a career in blues, I gradually realized I had inadvertently reached a pinnacle for me – sometimes, when you reach the top of one mountain, you realize the next step is a different mountain. I found myself soon drawn to study other kinds of music – especially Indian music, Western classical music, and avant-garde 20th century music, eventually getting my degree in music composition.
But this memory, like every memory we have of extraordinary, grace-filled and formative moments in our lives, takes me back and hopefully forward as well to the realms of infinite possibility that we sense could somehow and somewhere manifest in our lives, like a divine melody that almost seems like it happens to us, that makes us want to sing and play forever, playing and living like that wonderful sound, a kind of call of blessed destiny, that inspiring dreams make when they come true.
…“Good Morning, Mr. Blues” by Otis Spann
Otis Spann