Reservation Blues

Happy Friday!

So I’ve moved on quickly to a new book this week—Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues. Here’s the premise: at some point in the early 1990s the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson appears one day on the Spokane Indian reservation running from the devil. He passes his bewitched instrument to Thomas-Builds-the-Fire—a storytelling misfit and the protagonist of the novel. I’m only a hundred pages in but I love the premise. Robert Johnson is trying to slip out of the deal he made with the devil (the devil gets his soul and Mr. Johnson gets to be the greatest guitarist ever), but Thomas and his friends seem willing to take it on as they start up a rock band and begin playing shows at the dive bars and joints in and around the reservations in the American Northwest. Like everything I’ve read by Alexie the novel reveals the desolation of Native American life—the alcoholism, the joblessness, the loneliness. But music seems to be providing the characters a way out. Though I know the devil will be looking for that guitar. We’ll see what happens.

Each chapter begins with lyrics to a song (I’m assuming the author made these up). I thought it would be fun to set one of them to music. So for this week check out my version of “Reservation Blues” which actually starts out the book, set right there at the beginning of Chapter I. I thought an old country-blues style fingerpicking approach would work best and I repeated the first line of each verse to imitate the blues call-and-response structure. I sat down with my old Silvertone acoustic at the piano and recorded this into my phone.

I love when writers include lyrics to songs in their novels. Stephen King, one of my favorite authors, does this all the time with classic rock, blues, and oldies songs. Shakespeare did it too—and with him most of the time we have no idea what melodies go along with the words. There’s a great drinking song in Othello—whoever directs the play gets to decide how to musically interpret the lyrics. So that’s what I did here.

As an English major in college I had a class called “Literature of the Blues”. The professor was a long haired hippy type and he basically passed out a huge packet of lyrics on the first day. We learned about the lives and experiences of the early blues musicians and also studied the language used in their songs. The professor also loved Bob Dylan so I remember studying songs like “Maggie’s Farm” in class. Cool stuff. Music is so important because it offers us a connection. Sure I have no idea what it is like to be on an Indian Reservation, but do I feel misunderstood sometimes (like the speaker in “Reservation Blues”) Of course I do. Does it feel like sometimes I “ain’t got choices”? Like I hear “no good news”? Yes! So the blues offers us something timeless…the roots of what it feels like to be human. When I was 20 years old would I have taken that guitar from Robert Johnson with all that it offered: escape, glory, excitement, hordes of adoring fans. Hell yeah. And the part about handing over my soul for all of eternity, well I may have been willing to overlook that. I can’t wait to find out what happens to Thomas-Builds-the-Fire.

Anyway here are the lyrics for you to read along with as you listen.

Thanks for listening and have a great weekend ! - Mick