I've got the blues: I couldn't be happier

PUBLISHED APRIL 23, 2001 • UPDATED APRIL 10, 2018

I was stung by the blues long ago. Specifically, my fascination is with the harmonica, or, as it is called when it is used to play the blues, the "harp." It makes me smile, even giggle. And one time it transformed me.

I can play the harp, badly enough to get the dog howling (I suspect she thinks the sounds I make have something to do with my death) and well enough for my son Nick to laugh and for me to appreciate how difficult it is to play at the level of the masters -- the African-American pioneers Little Walter Jacobs, Big Walter Horton, James Cotton, Sonny Boy Williamson I and II and, my harp hero, Sonny Terry.

And there is another player, who is certainly up there with Sonny Terry. I saw him perform only once, just for a few minutes, almost two years ago in Toronto. But even with this brief exposure, I knew he had "it." This guy could really play.

He was a street person, with the long, matted beard, the hollow eyes and look of hopelessness and homelessness that is too common on the streets of big cities today.

I met him on a blustery, grey Sunday morning in November.

I had just dropped my son Sam off at an appointment in the pretty neighbourhood around Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue in north Toronto. I had an hour to kill. After puttering around the bookstores, I decided to get some air and sat on some steps in front of a shop that sells organic soaps. The wind was blowing hard and shooting grocery bags and stray newspapers into the air.

And from out of this wind, I heard the most wondrous sound.

There are a lot of ways to play the blues on a harp. Little Walter specialized in a dirty, growly sound indicative of the Chicago school of blues. Sonny Terry, on the other hand, often went for a country blues flavour, peppered with his famous "whoops." Either way, I think the best blues harp players achieve a surprising sweetness, when the music loses its edge and takes on a playful, joyous feeling.

That's what I heard this time. When I found its source, sitting in front of a Shoppers Drug Mart, I couldn't believe it. Moments before, I had seen him wandering up Yonge, bags in hand. Now, he was blowing that harp like Sonny Terry himself. And the more I listened, the better he got.

I put $10 in his box. He stopped and nodded, with a rather embarrassed smile. "You are fantastic," I said. He nodded again in thanks. I had to say more. "No, I mean it. You really are something."

What I wanted to add was, "What are you doing out here?"

Maybe he knew what I was thinking. "I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I ussssssssssed to pppplayyyy the gggguitttar, but the Ppppppppppparrrrrkkkkinson's . . ." he said. He held up his hands. They were shaking, and it wasn't from the cold wind.

A wave of sadness came over me when he said this. For more than a year, I was frozen on the notion that life is so horribly unfair sometimes. I thought about this man every day. In fact, I didn't play the harp all that time. I couldn't find the joy in it anymore.

But one summer day, the tragedy of his situation gave way to a curiosity about that sweet sound he played. "How did he do that?" I wondered. I tried it. It was hard. "Too hard for me," I thought. Frustrated, I was just about to put my harp away, but I thought of this guy, remembered him sitting on the sidewalk, in the cold, with Parkinson's shaking his body, and how he was still playing.

So I gave it another try. And another.

I'm still trying. But his example opened something up in me. I've since found a passion for the harp that I hadn't known. Actually, I've found a new passion for pretty much everything. I've gone deeply into the blues, into learning about the people who invented it, and why they invented this music, which is as much a form of emotional therapy as it is a musical genre. "There was a big difference between having the blues and playing the blues," said writer Albert Murray in the PBS series, Jazz. "Playing the blues was a matter of getting rid of the blues." He's right about that. I know it.

I've even connected with my kids in a new way. I recently got Glenna and Sam to watch (after much pleading) a video of Sonny Terry playing with his partner, guitarist Brownie McGhee, on a Pete Seeger TV program from the 1960s.

"When you listen to rock music today," I told them, "these are two of the guys who invented it." Glenna and Sam are teenagers, so, of course, they rolled their eyes at their old man lecturing them, once again, on the glory of days gone by. But there came a special moment when Sonny was wailing away on Rock Island Line and the kids got quiet, their eyes widened, and they looked harder at the screen, with a faint, but real, glimmer of "How's he do that?" I'm positive they were stung, too. My heart just soared.

Isn't it something how I have been so profoundly inspired -- changed, really -- by people who have been so down on their luck -- so oppressed. The masters of the blues were, well, African-American, the descendants of slaves. Sonny Terry was also blind. Brownie McGhee walked with a pronounced limp, the result of polio in childhood.

My newest hero has Parkinson's disease and played for coins in the cold November wind.

And it's got me thinking that their story wasn't their oppression, or their sadnesses, but what they did in spite of it all. It's clear to me now that the real inspirations in life are often from the people you'd least expect.

I owe these blues people my thanks for taking me deeper, making me think harder. And I owe my Yonge Street harp virtuoso a hell of a lot more than the 10 bucks I gave him.

Now, if I could just find him and tell him that. Paul Fraumeni is a writer living in Toronto.