If Your Ever In Clarksdale [sic]

At the Urbana Sweet Corn Festival, I kept passing this corner booth blasting some intense blues and a sign advertising CDs for ten bucks a pop. I thought, that's good blues for a local guy. Aine and I both have been curious about finding some local jazz and blues around the CU. You know: find a bar with live music, get into the scene. So I figured a good place to start would be this guy: Deak Harp. Only, I never saw anyone in the booth and the CD basket sat empty.

At one point, ready to leave and counting out tickets to buy a gigantic bag of Kettle Corn destined grow old and stale in the cabinet, I passed the booth and saw him. Deak Harp. Local blues legend. He wore a black driving cap and a goatee and dark sunglasses. He looked like Ray Wylie Hubbard and Harry Connick, Jr. and someone's dad hitting mid-life crisis, all rolled into one. I thought this guy's got to be legit. I stomped over and shook my ten dollar bill at him.

"I want one of your CDs," I said.
"Aww, yeah," he nodded. "You musta heard me playin' earlier."
"No," I said, waggling my ten. "I heard the music on the speakers. I like it. I want to hear more."
He snatched the Hamilton from my butter-greased fingers.
"Oh, that ain't me on the speakers. That's me on the CD, though. You want me to autograph it?"

Well, we listened to him on the drive home. He's got a wailing harmonica and a thumping base and scratchy feedback and all the usual blues lyrics. Pretty much everything you could want from a blues album.

I looked him up, this Deak Harp. Ole Deak learned his stuff from James Cotton who played with Muddy Waters. He stamps this genealogy all over his website, so it must mean something. You know, I studied under David Gaines who wrote an article for Texas Monthly about Kinky Friedman. So you should watch me smoke a cigar. Deak makes it explicit that he's playing in the Chicago Blues Style. I've found this appellation lobbed about rather flippantly as though anyone knows that the hell it means.

In case you don't, here's the cheap tour of blue history:

1. Country Blues came first, in the early 1900s. They played this guitar-only blues all acoustic, mostly because they didn't have electricity. These are your folk-blues singers: Furry Lewis, Mississippi John Hurt.
2. Delta Blues flourished in the 1920s and 1930s as a regional form of Country Blues, specifically along the Mississippi River in the state of Mississippi. They figured out electricity by this time, so it's plugged in. It's most famous for its use of the harmonica and the slide guitar. Also called the Bottleneck Style because, well, they would stick a bottleneck on their finger to do it. Think: John Lee Hooker.
3. Chicago Blues emerged as an new take on Delta Blues style in the 1950s. They play this blues louder. A lot louder. They use amplifiers and additional instruments like the drums, the trumpet, the sax, and the piano. Chicago Blues boasts the crooners you're probably most familiar with: Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Jimmy Reed... and our own Deak Harp.

All that said, ole Deak seemed like a swell guy and I would go hear him play sometime. I didn't get any pictures or video of him at the festival, but I found him on YouTube playing one of the songs on the album I bought:

You'll notice in the video he's playing three instruments at the same time which would have impressed me if I hadn't already seen Dick Van Dyke (of Danville) play seven: