Sonny Blake
Sonny Blake grew up in Arkansas near the Texas border helping his father crate people’s goods around in his wagon and listening to any music that came his way. White hillbillies and black blues pickers and Mexican serenaders- if they could sing and play Sonny was watching, listening, taking it in. His father sang some as they hauled the loads, old timey songs with good stories in them and his mother played a fiddle sometimes in church. Born at the beginning of the Depression, Sonny spent a lot of nights listening to the distant radios of the people who had electricity and trying not to think about his empty stomach. Once they stopped and listened to a hillbilly band playing in front of a microphone in the courthouse square, and that combination of the music and the amplification, the electric boost and thrilling distortion, went right to Sonny’s heart. When he starting daydreaming about playing music himself it was always in front of lots of people and through a microphone.
His father’s horse died and there wasn’t enough to buy a new one and then his mother passed and there wasn’t so much reason to stay put. He had a guitar of his own by then, an acoustic from a mail-order catalogue and he went right from learning A Spanish Fandango from the instruction booklet that came with it to trying to figure out the things T-Bone Walker was putting on his records. He started his wandering- Oklahoma, Missouri, Texas- playing for nickels on the street and picking up little jobs here and there. He could make things work, mechanical things, electrical things, that had been broken. He was back to visit his relatives on the Arkansas side in the last year of the War when the draft board caught up to him, old enough now to be in the Army.
Sonny trained with a support unit, black soldiers learning to drive trucks, and when his tinkering skills were discovered he was transferred to the Signal Corps and sent to Japan, bombed-out and defeated now, and set to repairing communications equipment. There were a few guys who could play in his outfit and they’d get together and do whatever everybody knew the chords to, trying to lure the sullen local girls a little closer. They shipped him back and dumped him in Oklahoma and he’s been on the road ever since, trying to catch on as a musician. He’s worked up his own electric guitar, double coil solid body music machine, something he’s starting to hear about but never actually seen anybody play, and to him it sounds better than what T-Bone or Blues Boy King or even Guitar Sam are putting out on the radio. He’s got ideas for the music, too- there’s fighter jets and rockets and automobiles that can go seventy miles and hour, people are mostly all hooked up to the juice, to the power now and the music has to reflect that, things are moving faster. Maybe not in this little backwater cotton town in Nowheres Alabama, but once they hear him throw down his sound they’ll pick up the pace a little too. He’s only here cause the train heading for New Orleans runs through it and a man’s got to eat once in a while. So getting famous on the radio will have to wait a few more days.
