Blues cues: No need to be sad to love this music
Kevin Gall can’t remember a time when he didn’t love music. “As a kid I would wake up every morning to the sound of my mom playing the piano in our living room,” he said. “We had a baby grand and she would get up and play and drink coffee.”
Gall’s taste in music continued to expand when he went to his first blues festival a few years ago.
“A guitar player started playing and this guy’s tone was like nothing I’d ever heard before,” he said. “After that I just started migrating to it.”
Gall, of Washington, was among the crowd of blues fans Sunday afternoon at the Central Illinois Blues Challenge and Nothin’ but the Blues Festival volunteer party at the Mackinaw Valley Vineyard.
The event was hosted by the Blues Blowtorch Society as a battle of the bands, where the winning group will go to the International Blues Challenge in Memphis. The society was also signing up volunteers to help run the Nothin’ but the Blues festival in Bloomington, July 21-22.
“The blues is the only original American music. It’s also the oldest and it’s engrained in American culture,” said event coordinator Randy Hoffman. “Our goal is to promote it and enhance that culture in Central Illinois.”
Hoffman said many people might not realize that a lot of the old bars on Bloomington’s west side carried some of the country’s most famous blues bands in the 1950s and 1960s.
“Most of those places are gone now, but back then they had some of the best,” he said.
Danny Meyers of Peoria, a bass player in the band, Rooster Alley has been playing the blues for 43 years. .
“The biggest myth about this music is that it’s sad,” he said. “That’s not true. It’s good time music and no matter who you are, what you are, what color you are, you get the blues.”
Bob Kieser of Pekin agreed.
“The chord structure and notes have a minor feel to them,” he said. “But regardless of what people say, it’s not sad-blues people love to party.”
Gall doesn’t perform, but he enjoys having jam sessions with veteran musicians.
“I really think there’s a big population of closet musicians out there,” he said. “These are the guys who played, but then got married, had kids and put the guitar under the bed.”
Gall said he constantly asks people if they play the blues.
“When it’s all said and done, they’ll get it (the guitar) back out,” he said. “It always comes back to the blues.”
Copyright © 2006, Pantagraph Publishing Co. All rights reserved.
