Why? I Really Mean It. Why?

When BareFootMusicNews started I was writing little blurbs on Facebook about the joy of making music. I was a neophyte, and I had recently found myself in a band and I was making music with other people and it was great. And Dan Grigor said I should do the same thing on Barefoot. I’m just fresh to music, and I came to it late in life, and I don’t know the minds of anybody else. All I knew was how great it felt to come in sync with other musicians and carry a tune and a basic rhythm. And then Dan, this twelve-string virtuoso blues folk classical rock musician whose been around as a musician forever, says he gets it. Wow.

To tell the truth, my skills are in writing, as modest as they are. I can turn a phrase. Recently I have joined a group called The Helsinki Writing Circle, and I am writing more stuff. Slogging it out now from many angles to serve some need I can’t identify. Is it ego? Do I get something out of it? Samuel Johnson, the guy who wrote the dictionary, said in the eighteenth century that anyone who wrote for any other reason except to make money was a blockhead. So where does that leave me? Some blockhead struggling to find his place in the world like everybody else who thinks a bit about stuff and doesn’t take the world at face value.

And over the years I think I have written some decent lyrics. And I have struggled with the alphabet and language of music, that thing called theory, in an attempt to make my harmonica do a bit more. I’m thinking there must be some sort of door I can open that will make everything flow, that there is something I can find that can raise me to Heaven and Bliss. And it helps. Doors do open and there are glimpses to somewhere. But you know what? There ain’t no Stairways to Heaven here. We exist in the physical world.

It is all about doing our daily functions, breathing, sleeping, creaking, groaning, heart beating, stubbing toes, jamming fingers, drinking tea and slogging through the brain work of theory so we can get to the physical act of forcing all those things up through our bodies and into our instrument. The world enters us constantly. It pounds its own rhythms into ours until we can’t tell the difference any more. Our instrument concentrates the world that is within us, that world that touches us softly and sometimes invades us. And our instrument plays what is inside us out for us. And for that we are blessed. For that has saved our life and allowed us to live in the world.

Of course, when I say “us” I really mean “me.”