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Back to school
Teaching blues at Harvard, and a video breakthrough for the Pernice Brothers
BY TED DROZDOWSKI

It’s the final day of class at Harvard Extension School, and the waitress is bringing a couple of well-drawn pints of Guinness and a Jameson’s straight up to one pair of students. Others are quaffing beer and eating burgers and buffalo wings while the band on stage charge into a version of Paul Butterfield’s gritty blues classic "Born in Chicago." Now this is the way school should be conducted, but it’s especially appropriate for a class in the blues, a music with a relationship to booze that goes well beyond rhyming.

But of course there’s more to the style than stories about whiskey-drinking women and guzzling canned heat. And there’s more to this class than a good time out in a Cambridge bar on a Tuesday night — not that any justification is required for that.

The class, a fall program called "History of Blues in America," meets 15 or 16 times a semester, ordinarily under the bright lights of a classroom on the Harvard campus. This is the second year it’s been taught, by the instructor who designed it, Charles Sawyer, who is also the author of The Arrival of B.B. King (Da Capo) and a helluva harmonica player. In 2003, Sawyer ended the class with a visit by King himself, who held court in a lecture hall speaking about his life and music and playing a couple of tunes. This year, it’s Sawyer who did the playing at the class finale, which took place a week ago last Tuesday, along with his band of local aces 2120 South Michigan Avenue, whose line-up includes the respected guitarist Peter "Hi-Fi" Ward and drummer John Hoik.

It’s improbable enough that Harvard, America’s leading Ivy League university, would have a course in the blues, even in its open-admission evening extension school. More improbable still that the final session would be an all-night jam at the Overdraught, an amiable pub on Cambridge Street that’s splitting bookings between roots music and rock and roll. But Sawyer and 2120 Michigan Avenue took the stage for their first set at 7:30 and didn’t let it go for two and a half hours. After the band had thundered through "Born in Chicago," the song that first sent Sawyer along the blues trail, they invoked the spirits of harmonica kings Little Walter Jacobs and Junior Wells with close-to-the-bone renditions of "Last Night," "Blues with a Feeling," and "Snatch It Back and Hold It," all powered by Sawyer’s beautiful bent harp notes and Ward’s subtle perfection. Then guests started hopping on stage. 2120 South Michigan Avenue had the Chicago sound covered. By the time guitarist/harmonica player/singer Chris "Stovall" Brown, vocalists Francine Calo, Sweet Willie D., and Kassie Buckley, guitarist Brad Faucher, and other local heroes had taken the stage, the music had swung from New Orleans to Texas to Memphis and to the Delta.

"I’m an evangelist," Sawyer told me after the musical travelogue had concluded. "I want to secure the place of blues in the history of our culture. When I’m really snookered by something, I want everybody to feel the same way. ‘Listen, this music is gonna knock you sideways because it knocked me sideways.’ When I show a video in class and the lights come up afterward, I secretly hope everyone will be on the floor because they’ve been knocked down by what they’ve seen and heard. I do get that kind of reaction to this music in more subtle ways. I’ve seen people cry under the bright fluorescent lights of the classroom because they’ve been touched by something in the music. Who cries in an economics class? My feeling is that if I can impart something that students can carry with them through life that will sustain them, enrich them, give them comfort, and rouse their curiosity like the blues has done for me, that’s wonderful."

Sawyer was first "knocked sideways" when he was driving along the Connecticut Turnpike in the mid 1960s and heard the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s "Born in Chicago" on the radio. "I had been listening to rock and roll, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but I felt like I had no real reference points for this sound. I didn’t really know about Little Walter or Muddy Waters at that point. But when I bought the Butterfield Blues Band album, it was a very solid slice of the music, with songs by Elmore James, a Willie Dixon tune, very traditional stuff along with two originals." Butterfield became Sawyer’s first harmonica inspiration, though later Little Walter, Big Walter, Junior Wells, and others would follow, including hands-on instruction from Mike Turk, Adam Gussow of Satan & Adam, and Mark Hummel, who got Sawyer to write liner notes for one of his albums by offering him lessons. Although Sawyer has performed for decades, he assembled 2120 South Michigan Avenue about five years ago.

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Issue Date: January 28 - February 3, 2005
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