the old bluesman

 
the old bluesman could have been robert johnson. but he wasn’t. he could have been son house or leadbelly or john lee hooker. he played a mean guitar and he said that he had given old slowhand guitar lessons. but he wasn’t howlin’ wolf either. he was just the old bluesman and that suited me fine. he was born and raised in the cotton fields back home in louisiana. when he was a little biddy baby his mama used to rock him in the cradle in them old cotton fields back home. but all that hard labor in the cotton fields broke his mama’s back and the good lord took her back to the great cotton fields in the sky to work the fields of gold what else, and his old man stuck a knife in the beer gut of a redneck during a drunken brawl and spend the rest of his life singing the folsom prison blues in a falsetto. when the old bluesman was sixteen he picked up a guitar and headed out way west looking for the dream. one day he hit a small town in minnesota called hibbing and met a snotty young man named robert zimmerman who had actually got the dream going his way. but the dream won him over and took him all over the yellow brick road till he found fame and fortune. the old bluesman then had headed down to sunny california where everybody was trying to be somebody else. by the time he got his dream going a bunch of englishmen with long hair had descended on him like a ton of bricks and stole the dream away, which in a way saved his life. i had met the old bluesman quite by accident. one day sitting home all alone smoking a reefer i heard the voice. i stepped out and there was the old bluesman by the door with a guitar in hand. he was strumming the guitar and he was that sweet man mississippi john hurt singing ..” you are a bad man. you mean old stagolee.”  he wasn’t  mississippi john hurt although at that time i thought he was. the old bluesman was my constant companion and he helped me through real hard times. i told him about my dream and he said that when it gets so that you can’t live without the dream to look him up and he would help me find the dream. “ the dream is a weird thing. in the us of a, everybody is looking for the dream. sometimes the dream can smother you with good intentions. sometimes the dream can take you by the forelock. sometimes the dream would hang around your neck like an albatross and you wouldn’t even know it. sometimes the dream may lie in wait like a rattlesnake ready to sink its fangs into you. sometimes the dream would sing you a lullaby and rock you to sleep. sometimes the dream would be the death of you.”