GIVE ME SOMETHING DIFFERENT

A story: well into his career, my friend and mentor Jim Dickinson was feeling embittered, was complaining about some music business bullshit. His pal cut him off, saying, "You were fortunate enough to witness the end of something truly great" — referring to the gradual dissolution of the original Memphis blues giants in the 1960s — "and you were intelligent enough to understand some of it." Memphis has always been willfully ignorant of the transcendent artists walking its streets, willfully negligent of the African-American culture that produced them. Jim had experienced a fleeting treasure that too few appreciated, a treasure no one could gentrify. The assessment chastened Jim, and bolstered him. It reset the context of everything.

I came along in Dickinson's wake, when many of the greats had already passed away — but not all of them. Not all by a long shot. When I first began hanging out at bluesman Furry Lewis's dilapidated duplex, I wasn't yet old enough to drive and it was harder for me to get a ride to that part of town than it was to buy Furry's pint of Ten High bourbon.

I'd learned of Furry at an outdoor Rolling Stones concert, Memphis, July 4, 1975. Mick Jagger delayed the band's performance until the sun went down, mistakenly assuming night in Memphis would be cooler and his makeup wouldn't run. To assuage the young audience's simmering restlessness, the Stones sent across town for a solo blues guitarist, about eighty years old, named Furry Lewis.

For this fourteen-year-old among fifty thousand rednecks on that hot football field, hearing Furry was life changing. The concert was an all-day 1970s spectacle, with three bands opening, plus the unscheduled bluesman. I'd enjoyed the warm-up acts; their big rock and roll sounds were just like their recordings, only livelier. But Furry's playing was unlike anything I could have anticipated; the still, small voice after the raging storms. His rhythms were slow, his songs full of space, his notes floated in the air. His music summoned us listeners instead of dazzling us with its size and force. His voice and laugh, the way the slide over his finger could elicit a moaning human voice from the guitar — there was an immediacy to his art that the Stones' big production could never match. The pageantry of the bands inspired awe while Furry's intimacy let me feel the wrinkles on the hands wrapped around the guitar neck, the texture of the strings; he let me hear the human being. The raw power of Furry's personality was so infused into his music and stories that his songs became his life, and he took me places I did not know, to times I couldn't have experienced. Transubstantiation.

I think I was familiar with the blues at the time — Memphis called itself "home of the blues." But I hadn't considered that the bluesmen might be alive.

And still playing.

In my town.

Thereafter, I was a seeker.

Less than two years later, a group Dickinson played in named Mud Boy and the Neutrons took the stage at a civic blues festival on Beale Street. This was 1977, my first time seeing Jim perform. Mud Boy was a bunch of white bohemians who'd come up playing alongside elderly black bluesmen in 1960s coffeehouses, creating new friendships that defied long-standing rules of segregation. But they were rockers. Mud Boy sounded like what the Stones would have if the Brits learned the music at the feet of the players instead of from black vinyl platters. Rather than spectacle, Mud Boy honed personality, allowing space for the music to breathe. I could hear Furry at the core of Mud Boy's music even though their instrumentation and presentation, with dancing girls shaking their moneymakers in the bright light of day, was much nearer to the Stones. The festival promoters, however, were less enthused by Mud Boy's raucous, lascivious take on the blues. This was a family event. Backstage, a band ally, Danny Graflund, heard the developing kerfuffle and ran onstage to whisper this little power-packed poem into Dickinson's ear:

They don't like the rock 'n' roll.

They don't like the dancing girls.

They're gonna pull the plug.

Midsong, the massive speakers crackled to silence. Catcalls and boos erupted from the audience. The band, incensed, shouted from the stage ("Tear down Beale Street, the symbol of oppression!"), and they paced like animals newly caged. Violence in Memphis is always on a patrolled simmer — this was less than ten years after Martin Luther King had been assassinated five blocks away — and cops assembled down front. The crowd was unforgiving, and as the tension mounted, I felt the bonding of mob mentality, the sense that this mass of angry, slightly drunk people could erupt. There were negotiations onstage and off, then the band reassembled — without the dancers — and the crowd's fury never ignited. I remember thinking that behind the near riot, at the core of Mud Boy's sound, was the power of Furry's solo blues.

As I got deeper in, my interest in the mainstream and what was popular went out the door. I was hooked on the feeling of the blues, on having my soul rattled instead of my bones. Rock and roll is hormonal fireworks, a temporal shout at earthly limits (which is why parents rocking out is so funny to kids). But the blues is a more sustained illumination, against the humiliation, rage, and sadness of life, and in turn invests the artist with not eternal youth but a scarred mortality, blessed with poetry.

The blues felt like home, even though my actual residence was a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom version of the American dream complete with private schools, summer camps, and professional parents. I responded to the power of the blues, though I did not experience that kind of want. My father was an attorney and my mother had her master's degree and worked as a speech therapist. (Rebellious, I've stuttered all my life.) We had income enough to live in lovely suburban homes in nice neighborhoods. My brother and I had our own bicycles and bedrooms. We had money, we didn't suffer need, we felt safe.

I began listening to the...