Erica Orloff - Diary Of A Blues Goddess

“Incredible second set,” Tony said, his brogue made thicker by the beers he’d had.

“Now how’d a man from clear across the ocean—you told me you’re from Dublin—come to know so much about the Delta blues is what I want to know.” Red smiled.

Tony shrugged, always somewhat taciturn until you got to know him.

“Come on, now, how come you’re here most every night I play…when you two ain’t playing?” By now he knew we were in a band. Albeit one that played ABBA.

“I may be an Irishman, but in another life I must have been a Delta bluesman. Since I was this high—” Tony stuck out his hand “—they’re all I’ve wanted to play.” Tony’s black eyes had a faraway look.

“Another life? You a Buddhist, man?” Red asked.

Tony laughed, his smile always having the ability to change his face from incredibly serious and tough-looking to something childlike. He shook his head. “Maybe I am…maybe I am.”

“And you?” Red turned his head to me. “You still got some fool idea you want to sing the blues?”

I nodded.

Red just laughed. More like a hoot. “Child, now singin’ the blues isn’t like singing wedding songs. You gots to feel it, here.” He tapped by his collarbone. “Inside.”

“You ought to let her sing you one,” Tony said almost inaudibly, staring into his beer bottle, the little vein on his forehead throbbing.

Red looked at me. “But do you have it? Inside. See…I used to travel this country in a bus with ten other stinkin’, sweatin’ men and a blues goddess or two. We’d play in club after club until we was so worn-out. Hungry sometimes. Laughing and good times, too. But half the guys, they’re into reefer and sometimes worse. Sometimes a lot worse. And ’cause we’re black, we play the biggest shitholes this side of the Mississippi. We play the chitlin’ circuit. We know the blues, ya see.”

“Let her sing,” Tony said simply, with authority. Something about Tony made people take him seriously. Then he leaned over to me. “Just sing a few lines of ‘At Last.’ Go on, gorgeous.”

So it wasn’t an audition. Not really. Just the three of us in a club still smelling of lingering smoke as the bartenders and barbacks were breaking the place down for the night, glasses clinking, the place sort of echoing now that nearly everyone had left. Half the houselights were up, the floors were sticky with spilled alcohol. I sang the first verse of the Etta James classic, my voice echoing. I had nothing to lose. Red had been telling me for months I was too much of a kid to sing the blues. I wasn’t hardened by the road. I had no right to sing the blues. Not like the first ladies of the blues who all did time in jail, or got hooked on heroin, or went through five and six marriages, unable to find lasting love.

I sang the lines, thankful I’d had four black Russians to give me some extra nerve. And when I was done, Red leaned back in his chair, mouth open. Tony looked smug and bemused. Red didn’t say anything for a good minute. Finally, eyes twinkling, he leaned forward and said, “Now, child, how come you never told me you could sing the blues before?”

I knocked on the door of apartment 1A, the ground floor of an old Southern courtyard home. Red rents it for a song, literally, from an eccentric dot-com millionaire (there are still a few of them left) who trades cheaper rent for weekly piano lessons—even though the guy’s still struggling with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

“Is that my girlfriend?” Red smiled and opened the door, enveloping me in a hug and pulling me inside.

His apartment is nirvana to me. Original posters of Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Sidney Bechet, Billie Holiday, Mildred Bailey and Duke Ellington hang in frames covering every square inch of wall. It’s a shrine to all things blues and jazz. Each week I walk in and knock on the framed Mildred Bailey picture for luck. Though I don’t know how much luck poor Mildred had. She had an unbelievable voice, a way of singing that made you feel it deep down. But she was sort of homely and overweight, consequently overshadowed by the blues singers who would be packaged and powdered like sex.

“Drink, sugar?” Red winked at me and pulled out a bottle of Chivas. It’s our Sunday ritual. We each have half a glass—all his doctors will allow him each day now—and toast to life, the blues, sometimes even to death. Whenever a blues or jazz legend dies, we observe a moment of silence. On those days, we cheat and have a full glass.

He poured me a scotch, which I drink out of deference to him, but which feels like hot fire sliding down my throat. It used to make me want to retch. I don’t know if it’s an acquired taste or what, but now I don’t cringe when I drink it. Because I am always striving for a more raw blues voice, I pray before each glass that it’s doing the trick.

“To Ma Rainey and Mildred, and all the jazz and blues goddesses, including this one right here in my livin’ room, Lord.” He poked a bony finger gently into the hollow between my collarbones. We clinked and swallowed.

“Mighty fine.” He smiled.

I blinked away the tears hard liquor always brings to my eyes. “Yeah, Red. This stuff is gonna kill me.”

“Ain’t killed me yet, and I’ll be eighty my next birthday.”

“I thought you were going to be seventy-nine.”

“Truth is, I got no idea.” He shrugged his shoulders, staring into his now-empty glass. I waited patiently to see if he might say more. He was often closemouthed about all he had seen and done, even about what his given name was, certainly not Red. But sometimes, a fragment of memory, maybe even a single chord on the piano, a song, a note…would carry him away to another time, playing piano with blues legends, riding in a bus in the Deep South during segregation. During times when he might have looked out a bus window at the countryside and seen a lynched black man hanging from a tree in the distance. Billie Holiday sang about that sight in a song entitled “Strange Fruit.”

“My mama died in childbirth, and I was sent off to live with my grandma,” he said softly. “My pa was always traveling in search of work. Then Grandma died…had to be when I was maybe ten. And I struck out on my own, but I never did know for sure how old I was because there wasn’t much fuss over birthdays in our house. Always too worried about feeding me, keeping warm in the winter…stuff like that. That was a long time ago. Different times, Georgia. Of course, my grandma was a good woman. She meant nothin’ by it—we just didn’t put too much stock in birthdays.”

His face was the color of pale coffee, and his eyes were coal-black and, with age, seemed to be perpetually teary, rheumy, the whites turning a yellowish color. He wore a pair of gold wire-rimmed glasses, and his hair was now a soft silver-and-black Afro, with a bald spot the size of a small saucer on the crown of his head. What fascinated me most were his hands. His fingers were long and graceful, wrinkled, the nail beds wide and pale. The tops of his hands were crisscrossed with raised veins, and when he put them to the keys of a piano, magic happened.

He stood up and went to the shiny black baby grand—a Steinway—by the window. He said it had taken him ten years to pay it off. Closing his eyes, he sat down and rocked back and forth a few times, hearing something in his head, some melody. Then he began to play, humming along to the tune he envisioned while playing complex harmonies and bebops I could only hope to one day come up with on my own.

Each Sunday was the same; he would start playing, and I would wait. He told me you can’t rush the blues. You have to hear the blues in your soul first. Actually, feel them first. So he would play and hum, and when I felt that my voice could be quiet no longer, I sang. Sometimes I sang old songs from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, sometimes newer arrangements, maybe some Diana Krall or Norah Jones. Sometimes I would just scat, which means singing nonsense syllables in a way that imitates a trumpet or maybe a tenor sax. With Red, I sang from deep inside, the place that was just instrument and soul. The place I shared with no one. Not even Maggie or Dominique. Most definitely not with Gary or Jack. Sometimes Tony, I guess. But only if we were both drunk. We all have that space. Maybe for some it comes out in prayer; for me it comes from my song.