No such thing as a prodigy of the blues,
I could well-imagine an old drummer
rasping, two days into the music.
And when we heard fifteen year-old
Taj Farrant growl his way through
“Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone”
I smiled just a bit at the experience
toward which this talented kid
was grasping. But halfway through his cover
of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s instrumental
“Lenny”—I found myself standing
in our patch of grass a hundred plus
yards from the stage, squinting as if
another sense could help me make sense
of the phrasing I was hearing—spidering
up and down the guitar’s neck,
channeling SRV’s experience, dedication,
even his pained addiction and premonitions
of an early death with earthy understanding.
So it seemed, surrounded by the epoch-layered
walls of the box canyon, the yellow aspens
bursting among evergreens as the early fall
sun climbed down the southern cliffs.
The same intense sun from which we shaded
earlier, swilling beer with our gang
in the garden on a day whose only blues
came from the stage where this magic
was happening. I clapped like mad
at the end. Put an asterisk after prodigy.
Chuck Sweetman earned an MA in Creative Writing from The University of South Alabama and a Ph.D. in American Literature from Washington University in St. Louis, where he taught as a senior lecturer. For years he was a senior editor for december Magazine. His essays, stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in such places as Verse Daily, Brilliant Corners, River Styx, Revel, Poet Lore, Black Warrior Review, and Notre Dame Review. His chapbook of poems, Incorporated, won the 2007 Dream Horse Press Chapbook Prize and was consolidated into the book Enterprise, Inc. (2008) for which he was awarded a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers Conference.
THE CITY KEY 