Black gold

"I'm here to tell stories about my people, about our history," says the 40-year-old Bronx resident, who learned from records and by seeing the older masters of the music. "If I have a mission, that would be it, because I think my people are like the blues: constantly in danger of extinction, by lack of self-knowledge. Our people have to bring back to life the stories of our struggles. There was Harriet Tubman and the others in the Underground Railway. That kind of material. I think the blues expresses who I am, who we are. I don't know that I want to promote the bad razor-man kind of blues stories, but I want to play all of it. 'Cause you have to know our whole story. I guess a part of my mission is to tell my son -- all of our sons and daughters -- to keep their eyes open."

And their ears. Because it's easy to hear Robert Johnson resonating in the keen of Davis's voice, Son House growling in his dusty low end. And plenty of Davis, too, in his own songs like the slide-shaded "Wintertime Blues," an ode to the warmth of a lost lover's arms. And in the stories he tells. Before "Madison & the Pigs," he unravels a tale about a farmer and his pampered livestock that's a slice of back-country ham as well as a harmonica showcase. It's the storyteller in Davis that's one of his most effective charms. Whether explaining how pissing off his wife on a Thanksgiving morning led him to write a sexy blues, or addressing audiences in his one-man Off Broadway theater piece In Bed with the Blues: The Adventures of Fishy Waters, he has an actor's talent for insinuating his way into the heart. No surprise -- not only because of his training, but because he's spent so much of his life around actors. His parents are the noted thespians and directors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. And Guy Davis got his earliest exposure to storytelling and American traditional music performed live as a kid attending a summer camp run by folk troubadour Peter Seger's brother, John. Nonetheless, his middle-class New York upbringing doesn't keep him from sounding convincing when he gruffly barks out, "When I woke up, my biscuit roller was gone," in Robert Johnson's "If I Had Possession over Judgement Day."

The fine Stomp Down Rider, a remixed and edited version of a live, self-released CD Davis recorded at the Music Hall in Tarrytown, New York, in November 1993, captures Davis's virtues but not his virtuosity. He's been working almost constantly since it was cut, and his slide playing, harp, finger-picking, and raw baritone have all made strides in intensity in the past two years. Playing live recently on the UMASS/Boston radio station WUMB and at the House of Blues, he came off as a genuine torchbearer of the country-blues spirit, delivering the old tunes with verve and authenticity, and pumping out his own songs as though they'd always been part of the music's historic catalogue.

But Davis cautions that, despite his desire to educate and to keep the embers of the music's cultural history aglow, "I still have to call myself an entertainer first. If people aren't having a good time, they're not going to be interested in anything I'm saying or the songs are saying." And though he concedes that his missives about the blues and its role in black culture are delivered before mostly white audiences, he does believe that urban African-Americans are coming back around to the genre. "Bit by bit, I see a few more faces at my shows. Some young black guys come pester me about giving them lessons these days. That's good. Maybe it's because more of our folks are becoming able to step back . . . they've had a little distance and time in generations from the days that the blues was associated with slavery and cotton picking and a lack of education, and maybe today they can appreciate the blues for the treasure that it is."