AND YOU KNOW IT DON’T COME EASY
A bluesy review of Smoketown Red
by Lisa Carver
One time Ethan Buckler took me to this old blues guy’s house in Kentucky. Red. Red had seven children but he kept going to jail. He had trouble making a living because though he was this phenomenal guitar player, his heyday came during the whole black power movement and he wasn’t dark enough to be POWERFULLY BLACK up there on stage. So people tended not to have him in their band. Well, now his children were grown and his woman was gone, and all he did all day was look out the window, drink coffee, play guitar and sing. Ethan would go over there a lot and do exactly the same. Within about half-a-minute of meeting me, Red told me to sing over his guitar. An Otis Redding song. I was told in church as a child to not sing, so loud and bad was I. In my twenties, a vocal coach told me to stop wasting my money and never come back to him. I am the only person in the whole world banned from praising god or allowing music teachers to earn a living. Still I love to sing, and do it all the time — but not immediately upon meeting a legend! I said no politely and shyly, and Red ORDERED me to sing! I said, “No!” I would have, maybe, if he’d let me hang out and drink some of his coffee first, but I didn’t like being told to just enmesh myself in another culture right off the bat like that. If he’d come to my house, I wouldn’t force him to feel suicidal yet glad at the same time and jittery and uncomfortable yet destined and start writing a book without so much as one sip of coffee. So then Red said to Ethan, “Tell your woman to sing or she’s gotta go.” Well I wouldn’t, and don’t you know that old goat kicked me right out.