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It’s Sex-Mad-Tree time down here in Plano, and this year the trees are having the wildest imaginable orgies---no, what am I saying?--- I mean the wildest unimaginable orgies (unimaginable unless you happen to be the Marquis de Sade or an English Premier League football player)---orgies with multiple partners---multiple simultaneous partners if the wind is blowing in the right direction! And of late the wind has been very strong, and those disgusting trees have been in full rut! And we all know how horrid rutting trees can be. Yes, it’s the time of trees getting all jiggly and wildly ejaculating pollen for all they are worth, and with no more thought for the morrow than Sen. Joseph McCarthy had for the Murrow and with similar dire results. And it’s me that’s suffering them---suffering from Pollenationally Transmitted Disease again---eye-watering and spluttering and sneezing like an emu on coke!
Ah! There should be a Tree Surgeon General’s warning nailed to every tree!
But mitigating all the tree sex and its concomitant sneezing and spluttering and eye-watering, was a visit from my son Raedwald---my eldest and tallest--no wait a minute he’s no longer the tallest, they all grow up---they all grow up, and now Hereb has just about overtaken him--though I’m relieved to be able to report that Rad’s still my eldest.
Anyway, Rad is a musician (and a fine one too, even allowing for some slight parental bias). He sings and plays and composes old style Blues and rags and stuff, and he came down to have me use my talent to promote his talent with a web site and cards and stuff.
Rad’s interest in old Blues means that he studies the works of such people as Robert Johnson (who, to my utter shock and initial dismay, was not the same Robert Johnson that I knew and delighted in: was not that great English lutenist-composer who worked with Shakespeare and at court in the early seventeenth century! Nor even, was he, the Scottish composer of the very same name who lived about a hundred years earlier---though the thought comes to me that maybe they were all the same person, which would lend credence to those legends of Rad’s Johnson going to the crossroads at midnight and selling his soul to the devil for a quick tune up of his guitar!
But Rad would hardly qualify as a son of mine if he weren’t into even earlier and folkier works, particularly in the Piedmont style of the Blues.
This meant, of course, that almost as soon as he started he developed a case of folksingeritis---you know, inflammation of the folk singer: a syndrome wherein the sufferer so closely emulates the style of their predecessors, who had a sad tendency to only make recordings when they were old, old creaky guys, so that a young guy in his twenties would end up sounding exactly like an old guy in his eighties (indeed often an old drunk guy in his eighties, since so much of the early recording was done in pubs and bars). Ahh! I’ve seen a lot of it back in England, on the folk scene, where some Oxford undergrad will cup his hand round his ear and immediately sound as though he’s spent the last fifty eight years mucking out the pigsty. In Rad’s case it was slightly different because he used to sound like an old black guy in his eighties who was also fairly obviously blind. But now (though I admit to a sort of sad sneaking and now lost delight in that sort of hyper authenticity) he’s got better---much, much better. And, especially in his own stuff, he now just sounds like a young guy who can sing and play well---which is exactly what he did almost continuously during the visit; and if only he hadn’t kept singing that song with the words
"Let it rain, let it pour
"Let it rain a whole lot more...."1 for the whole of the only complete day I took off work, and if only the weather hadn’t taken him at his word, we wouldn’t have had all those wild thunder storms---still, like throwing a bucket of water over a couple of dogs in the street, it did cut down on that pollen for a few hours.
Cheerio for now
from
Richard Howland-Bolton
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Notes:
1 Deep River Blues
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