Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock ’N’ Roll by Peter Guralnick

Author:Peter Guralnick [GURALNICK, PETER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316206761
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Robert Pete is still working on new techniques today. Just before we arrived he had bought himself a rack harmonica, and he was anxious that we hear him play slide, because, he said, he had been practising the last few months. The blues he sang for us were certainly just as imaginative, and just as intense, too, as the blues that he has put on record. And yet, as he himself admits, “Sometimes I got the blues so bad I just got to play. Other times I just don’t feel it. Just the other day my wife asked me if I could play a blues for her. But I couldn’t do it. I just didn’t have that feeling.” Lately there are more and more of these days, and, prompted no doubt by the same sense of ambivalence which has pursued him all his life, he has foresworn the blues altogether several times in the past few years. At one point he asked us, “Would you like me to make up a blues for you?” and the song he sang for us was a brilliant, imaginative fantasy of a train trip he had taken recently between Peoria and San Jose. But he shook his head sadly at the end and complained that he didn’t really have the feeling even that day and that the song itself was unsatisfactory to him.

It may perhaps be necessary, then, to look on the prison blues as the product of a unique combination of genius and circumstances which, one would certainly hope, is not about to be repeated. For Robert Pete Williams there is no difficulty in adjustment. He has never regarded himself as a professional musician; until recently he never made any money from music at all, and it may have been our describing him as a blues singer as much as anything else that made it so difficult for us to find him. Certainly his neighbours know him better as a scrap-iron collector and he thinks of himself more as a man who has worked hard all his life than as a bluesman like Lightnin’ Hopkins or Slim Harpo or Lightnin’ Slim, all of whom he has met more as a fan than as a professional colleague since his release from prison.

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