Blues for Sonny Gholson

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                  Robert "Sonny" Gholson 1931-1993
                  piano player, musician, teacher

Most of the time, adrift in this city
of circles, you and I whirled past
each other like the downtown bus
and the uptown bus in a hard rain—
you blind all your life, me going deaf,
unable to hear the higher registers.
But once in a while I would get lucky,
be invited to a party in the Inner City,
and you would be there, playing the blues
with just a touch of boogie thrown in,
along with something indefinable—
an echo of the Avenue, back in the days
of Jack Dupree and Montana Taylor,
Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell,
all those old dudes still going strong
in the way you bore down on the keys.

When you let me sit in, I reached for
something even older - newsreels
flickering in the neighborhood theater,
Julia Lee Niebergall at the upright,
May Auferheide turning the pages—
the past shimmying across the screen,
Babe Ruth with his big goofy smile,
Helen Wills Moody stroking the ball,
Jack Johnson shaking Caruso's hand,
both of them wearing straw skimmers,
dancers doing the hootchie-cootch
at the St. Louis Fair—
                                   all those rhythms
and syncopations mostly forgotten now,
gathering dust on the shelf with stride piano
and rent-party music—except for times
when they came back, for an hour or two,
like ghosts at Halloween, in the sound
of scratchy old 78s issuing from some
hand-cranked Victrola.
                                       Or like that night
in late October, in the early Nineties,
when you and I took turns coaxing
an ancient, out-of-tune, grand piano
with a dead middle C, in a mansion
where Gershwin had been a guest,
and the dizzy hostess once read palms
for visiting celebrities like Clara Bow
and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.
                                               "Tuckaway,"
the house was called, and it was jumping
that particular night, with mounds of food
and rivers of booze, and people jammed
in the dining-room and kitchen, while
on the back porch a ten-piece Irish band
wheezed Celtic jigs and fierce laments
about the Troubles and the Black and Tans.
In the front room with the stone fireplace,
with the overflow crowd standing around,
you and I were left to our own devices.

It would be the last time I heard you do
"So Long Blues" and "Honeysuckle Rose,"
the last time you sat across the room
tapping out the beat on your knees
while I zipped through "Dizzy Fingers"
and "Rialto Ripples." Your turn again,
and we went on that way, mixing rags
and blues and show tunes, adding
to the voices and laughter, going long
into the night.
                        And now, my friend,
no more of those good times. Goodbye,
Sonny, and God bless. Let not the dark
thee cumber. You played the blues
the way they ought to be.
                                          Each time
I got to hear you was like one minute
being cold and out of work, waiting
at the bus-stop, not a dime to my name,
and the next minute looking up to see
a ten-dollar bill blowing in the wind,
coming straight down the sidewalk,
heading right for where I'm standing.