Blues artist shares thoughts, music with students
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Article RatingGuy Davis was, by his own admission, an “unmotivated student” who didn't care for reading.
The admission was made during a storytelling workshop for fourth-graders Friday at the Harrisburg Academy, where the New York musician/composer spent the day in residency.
As part of the residency - funded by Jump Street/Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Greater Harrisburg Foundation, and Target - Davis also gave a guitar class for older students and traced the early history of blues music at a full-school assembly.
At night, Davis performed a concert sponsored by the Susquehanna Folk Music Society, which has an ongoing collaboration with the academy. The performance was in cooperation with the Blues Society of Central Pennsylvania.
Encouraged by parents
Davis said his parents encouraged him to read - with good reason: they were famous actors and writers, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.
And although he was an unmotivated student, he has since come around.
Today, words mean a great deal to him - as much as music does, he told the younger students.
A multifaceted artist who has done acting, directing and writing, Davis has focused in the last decade or so on reviving acoustic blues through the materials of blues masters, African-American stories and his own original songs and stories. He has produced several albums. His latest, “Legacy,” was chosen as one of the year's best CDs by National Public Radio, and its lead track, “Uncle Tom's Dead,” was one of the best songs of the year. He has been nominated for nine W.C. Handy Awards.
Davis also contributed to the title track to “I Will Be Your Friend: Songs and Activities for Young Peacemakers,” a CD of songs with a teacher's aide kit to help teach diversity and understanding. It is distributed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in public schools nationally.
Despite all of Davis' accomplishments, he walked into Harrisburg Academy's fourth grade uninitiated: “I've done a lot of blues and guitar workshops but this was my first storytelling workshop.”
At first the fourth-graders sat politely as Davis began strumming on his six-string 1959 Gibson acoustic guitar, telling a story interspersed with snippets of songs about the young son of sharecroppers and his Uncle Juno, who introduced him to the guitar.
The mood became electric after Davis put down his guitar and challenged the students to compose stories of their own.
“If you're going to tell a story, use words that appeal to the senses,” he advised.
The hands began going up as students shared their ideas - coming up with sentences that described things and then situations with the most evocative words they could find.
‘A writer in the room'
Davis responded enthusiastically as students offered such sentences as, “She felt a spray of ocean on her face;” “She felt the grass tickling her ankles,” and “the smell of fear” as a student waits in the principal's office.
“We have a writer in this room,” he said, smiling.
Then, putting five random objects, including a quarter and a watch, in front of the room, Davis asked the fourth graders to weave together stories that would include all of them.
“Out in the details,” he urged. “Let your imaginations soar.”
Although Davis grew up in a suburb of New York, he was connected to the storytelling traditions of African Americans through his Southern-born grandparents and great-grandparents.
“Stories got told,” he said.
“The greatest storyteller was my grandmother, my father's mother, who died at the age of 105. But stories come from every tradition, and they survive.
“Maybe it's less of a formal tradition, but I hear people telling stories on the stoops of apartment houses in New York.”
The artist's connection to blues was more remote. It wasn't the kind of music played by his parents.
“I first heard blues played and sung by white college kids,” he recalled. “It sounded good.
“At the time, I didn't know it had any ancestral relationship to me. But,” he added, “blues feel very personal to me.”
Variety of images
Some of the songs he sings relate to work gangs, drinking problems and prison time. But music scene observers also note that Davis' playing recalls the origins of blues as good-time, dancing music.
For Davis, the blues also were the beginning of his storytelling, although 10 years as a standup comic and improv artist contributed as well.
“I had become an entertainer and liked that part, but snuck in stories while tuning up,” he said.
“Just by being onstage and having people's attention, I got a little better at telling stories.”
Ironically, storytelling fulfilled his parents' wish for him - that he appreciate words.
“If there's real magic,” he told the fourth graders at Harrisburg Academy, “stories are them. The greatest magic in the world comes from stories.”
And stories set to music.
