SHCH Open Mic April 18!
This month we have our Open Mic on April 18, 2025, at 6:30. Your hosts will be MC Top Hat and Susanna Tamborina, to welcome you and introduce the rising Stars of Spring!
Our poster this month features the wonderful Guy Davis, a Bluesman, Activist, Actor, and Singer-Songwriter. He loves acting, but he lives with the old music of the South in his veins.
He even wrote some songs about tolerance, that were somehow sent out to every public school in America. He is determined to make a difference. MC Parker has written a beautiful tribute to Guy Davis, so please see below!
Tribute to Guy Davis
Parker Gambino – April 8, 2025
To me, Guy Davis is a bridge. Though he’s not one of the original old-school bluesmen, he is well-schooled in their work. Though he’s not from the South – he grew up in the New York City suburbs – the South is in his family’s roots. He is a scion of a great African-American lineage steeped in entertainment, tradition, and activism, the son of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and it’s in his blood to carry on as a voice in service of social justice causes.
Guy has inhaled just about every variety of Americana music. Once it enters him, it courses throughout his body, where it is metabolized into something that, when breathed back out, is uniquely his own. Whether an ancient blues standard (or obscurity), a folk-revival chestnut, or an original composition, he puts his own stamp on it, reconfiguring the dots for us to hitch ourselves to that grand connecting of dots that is folk culture. The range of the husky rasp of his voice encompasses mournful lamentation, brash braggadocio, and tender vulnerability. Guy, to explain his relish, has claimed, “There is no tale so tall that I cannot tell it, nor song so sweet that I cannot sing it.”
Guy’s proximity, cultural, philosphical, and geographical, made it natural for him to be in the orbit of the master, Pete Seeger, starting with his first exposure to banjo via Pete’s brother John. One clear lesson was the importance of bridging members of the audience to the stage, with invitations to join the sharing of personal vibrations in sing-along opportunities, a regular feature of Guy’s live performances.
Bridging to the next generations is perhaps the most significant duty of all, as it builds a future. In this regard, Guy has picked up the torch, and is passing it forward. He has received commissions to create curriculum guides and resources to be used for classroom teaching about a specific American genre, the blues. From one of these guides I learned that “Jelly-bone jelly” is blues-slang for girlfriend! His icing-on-the-cake live performances at participating schools really seals the deal.
Guy is a nexus of creative activity; his bridging extends to the stage and various media derivatives, as a stage actor as well as a content creator. He grabs your imagination by making it hard to discern whether he is inhabiting a character, or the character is inhabiting him. This dynamo troubador is in constant demand as a solo artist and collaborator.
I have been fortunate to attend two Guy Davis performances. The sketch painting for this month’s poster was made at a 2006 blockbuster event at Lincoln Center, American Blues Raises the Roof, which was also the source for the Hazel Dickens poster last September, and for additional sketches of Bettye LaVette and Chico Hamilton. A second performance, in more intimate surroundings, is documented in my link below.
Links
NPR “Talk of the Nation” interview
Parker’s review of 2012 Guy Davis performance
Performance Videos: