The easy cool bass player would restring his guitars and tune them for him; in exchange the musician would show him a few licks, tell him more stories.

There is an older guy at the bar -- yeah, yeah, there are more than one -- who you can tell was good-looking in the day, and he still walks with an easy cool you can't practice. Wise eyes that are somewhat sad. He was a musician, of course. Bass player back in the days of R&B that played with, well, an easy cool.

His fathered managed a club in Seattle in the Fifties and Sixties, booked the music acts. A lot of the acts were the black blues musicians who toured relentlessly at the time, driving themselves from club to club across the country and back. Seattle would probably like to think they welcomed these black musicians back then, but -- sorry, Seattle -- the Coon Chicken Inn only closed in 1949. There was certainly a white audience for these players, but often the players would stay the night at the club manager's home: cheaper, simpler, less potential problems that way.

The easy cool bass player was a young teen at the time, learning to play, and deeply in love with the music: having these players at his home were experiences that are still close in his heart. He has a lot of stories from this era -- he looks you in the eye, wise and somewhat sad, when he tells them --  and I certainly don't mind when he tells one that he has already told me before: it is a wonderful lost world to peek into, and he knows how to tell a story.

There was a blues musician that came through the club frequently, maybe two or three times a year. He would stay with the family, eat dinner, tell stories of the road. The easy cool bass player would restring his guitars and tune them for him; in exchange the musician would show him a few licks, tell him more stories. The guy did not like Chuck Berry: he said Johnnie Johnson wrote the songs straight up.

There are a lot of people at the bar who once lived in a different Seattle. Occasionally the songs they remember get played on the jukebox.



- james james

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