Possum
Possum was there when Buddy Bolden sat down in the middle of a funeral march and forgot his own name. Possum was there when the riverboat bands played up and down the Mississippi, when the first young black man threw down the plow for the music life, when Robert Johnson died howling in pain from the poison in his gut. It was Possum, sitting on a flatcar in a railroad station and playing for himself, who W.C. Handy heard and wrote it down as the blues. Possum knows what you’ve been up to, knows how you feel. He knows when to be there and when to disappear. He gets under your skin.
He can play the music simple or he can get it talking back to itself, get a whole roomful of voices going on the strings. He bends the notes sometimes because it feels right and because people aren’t that simple, right in the same evening they can slide on you, bend their moods from one thing to another. And if the trombone man can do it, why not the guitar? Possum can make you cry with a song that sounds happy and make you laugh at one that is mean and ugly. He sits just a little outside of life, hearing people’s dramas, their little hopes and fears and jealousies, and smiles cause it’s all already been done in one of the songs. He knows how when you’re poor and miserable and a little bit drunk the music can be a reminder that somebody has been poorer, more miserable, drunker than you. And he knows how the music can lift you out of your body, out from behind your plow, your cotton row, your chain-gang slogging and up somewhere else where it’s easier to breathe.
Possum has known Tyrone since he first sat on a piano bench, but only came to speak to him, to play for him, after he killed that boy in a barroom fight. Tyrone is afraid now, cornered, and Possum has to push him a little to see which way he’ll go, what he’s really made of. The music is moving on and Tyrone is hesitating, not sure he can follow it anymore, and this young one, this Sonny who’s made his own box out of wood and wires and electricity, is full to bursting with what the next sound is going to be. Be an awful shame if that train just passed Tyrone by without stopping, an awful shame if that guitar boy didn’t get to ever sit with a piano man who can really play, play the ivory right off them keys. These two people, Tyrone and Sonny, have got to meet somehow. And that’s where Possum comes in, cause he is the place where their music was born.
