Rules of the Blues

When I was sixteen, I went to Detroit on a school trip.  Wandering around the little neighborhood of Trapper's Alley, where I would later buy a potted ivy that still sits in a window all these years later, I came across an old bluesman sitting on a bench.  He wore an immaculately pressed suit, sharp, if a few decades out of style, a pair of dark glasses, a broad, bright grin and an old guitar that had seen more life than I had, then. 

            I asked if I could sit beside him, listen to him play for a while, and he just laughed and told me that he didn't own the music and I could do as I like.  We sat for a while, he and I, talking and playing, passing the guitar back and forth with its deserved reverence.  Along with the memories, I took away from that night an early education in the blues, as, fittingly, handed down to me from one musician to another.

            "Son," he told me, a slow grin making its way across his face, "you got to remember two things, if you want to play the blues, and God only knows why you would.  First, ain't nobody owns music, so it can't be stolen.  You take a song, change it a little, make it yours and that's what it is, till someone else hears you play it, then it becomes theirs, too."

            "Second, your first guitar can't be new.  It's got to come second, maybe third, hand.  It's got to have stories, got to know the music, cause one of you got to know where to put your hands, and sure as hell ain't gonna be you."  He laughed at that last part.  I laughed with him.

            I never got his name, but I still carry what he told me and I've passed it along, as opportunity or necessity demanded.  I still play the guitar I bought the Christmas after I met that old bluesman, pulled off the rack, a little worn, and I've added some of my own stories to it.  It still knows more than I do, I think, about where to put my hands, but I think I'm okay with that, all things considered, because sometimes, when I close my eyes and I just let the music come, I hear it whisper, let it lead, and it carries me away.