"You
got a minute?" Drink Small asked me during our phone interview.
"Yeah," I said.
"All right," he said. The bluesman left the phone. A television was audible in the background.
After a few seconds, the man who for 35 years has called himself the "Blues Doctor" returned with his guitar and played a song about the Mississippi Valley Blues Festival - how he wants to the meet the mayor of Davenport, how he played the event 10 or 12 years ago. "I can do the same thing," sang Small, who returns to the festival this weekend, "but I can do it better at the age of 74."
It's
only a slight overstatement to say that blues piano legend Henry Gray
has played with everybody who's anybody.
We
at the IH Mississippi Valley Blues Festival are proud to open the
2007 Tent Stage performances with Memphis' own Robert "Wolfman"
Belfour.
If
you want to hear some of the best, most energetic boogie-woogie and
barrel-house blues piano around, make sure you get to the Fest site
early on Sunday for Doña Oxford. As Blues
Revue says, her work on the
ivories is "stunning."
