Musicians S.E. Willis and Sweet Baby Ray DeSylvester were scheduled to play the Old Town Music and the Market on Friday, Sept. 1.
Willis has been playing the piano and harmonica since the age of 6, and organ and accordion since his teenage years. He specializes in Americana and roots music, touching on genres including blues, country, rockabilly, gospel and zydeco. Willis joked that he probably would have been more into bluegrass but he must have picked up the wrong instruments, since no bluegrass band ever seemed to need a piano player.
In the 1960s, Willis moved to Arizona, where he played rock ’n’ roll in Flagstaff and along Route 66. He shared memories of how rock ’n’ roll was on the radio all the time in those days and how much he loved it.
“I pretty quickly noticed that rock ’n’ roll was blues-based,” Willis said. “Eric Clapton and those guys are all talking about how much they like BB King and Muddy Waters. At 17, I thought, why am I listening to Eric Clapton when I could be listening to B.B. King and Muddy Waters?”
That was the beginning of how Willis’ rock ’n’ roll taste evolved into a more blues-based approach to music. After diving into blues, he started listening to and studying country music. He pointed out that country is white working class music and blues is black working class music, and he wanted to look at the potential for blending the two.
Over time, Willis said, that seemed like less and less of a productive angle, although he found it was good for practicing songwriting and creativity.
“I think it’s a good thing to step outside the boundaries of the genre and look at it,” Willis said.
Willis also addressed some differences he’s seen in the music industry over the past few decades. “We really had to hang around record stores and wait for the occasional blues album to show up in the stack and grab it,” Willis said. “Nowadays you can go on YouTube and find videos of everybody ever. The music is there and it’s accessible,” although he added that the culture around the music is lacking.
“I don’t know that it’s ever going to turn around,” Willis said. “I feel like there’s a human element to the older forms,” observing that certain electronics take away that human feeling. “Can you really play blues music with a drum machine? I think there’s a connection there to some kind of deep human thing that electronics just don’t touch.”
Willis mentioned the rise of 1950s teeny-bopper idols like Frankie Avalon who allowed the record industry to have a controlling grasp on the scene. He said that when rock ’n’ roll came along it really took people by surprise, catching the radio and record companies off guard and prompting their efforts to find a way to get it under control.
Once the British came along, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the record companies were shaken up all over again.
“Now it’s completely under the control of something but it’s hard to know what,” Willis said. Nowadays, musicians can create their own records in the comfort of their own homes. “On the other hand, nobody can get anybody to listen to it without spending a lot of money and having backing.”
Willis then linked this back to roots music, which he argued has had a huge influence on many musicians but gets buried under everything else.
“The older musical forms and music itself is based on the heartbeat, especially blues music,” Willis said. “At a certain point it starts to seem like folk magic. If you get deep into the music, it’s moving. It takes you somewhere else. It’s like meditation or a drug, except drugs don’t work that well.”
