The band sets into it, and the crowd follows them along.

Well, everyone but me and that couple too busy making out to notice anything else.

What I see and hear turns my stomach. Privileged white kids freaking out to other privileged white kids badly covering old blues standards.

I’m done with them before they’re done with their first song.

“Not stickin’ around?” The doorman asks me as I break out into the cold night.

“Newspaper said they were blues. That ain’t blues.” I said with a growl.

“Sounds like it to me.” He replies, then quickly adds, “No refunds.”

I sigh, and turn to him, something inside me snapping.

“The blues is a duet between a man and his pain. A man’s fingers might be on the strings of a guitar, and the voice in his throat, but it’s the pain that’s makin’ the music.” I jab my finger toward the venue. “Those ain’t men, and they sure as hell ain’t never known pain, not any real pain.”

He stares at me blankly, obviously not expecting that kind of response. We shrug at each other as he goes back to checking IDs as I walk off into the dark.

Memphis Note
Every few years a group of middle class white kids will discover the blues and get some attention about how they’ve updated the genre for the modern audience. But none of them ever get it quite right, there’s always something missing. Which is why we still revere the name of Robert Johnson, but can’t remember the names of bands like this at all.

“You think you’re the only GI that ever killed a Jerry, boy?” The withered man waved his cane at no one in particular, but his words were directed at the uniformed guard that had stopped him in the lobby of the hospital.

A white coated doctor approached the two of them, a concerned look on his face. “I’m sorry, is something the matter?”

The cane sliced through the air, stopping mere inches from the doctor’s nose. “Damn right there is!” said the ancient veteran, his words slurring through loose dentures. “Where do you get off changing the name of the street a man lives on!?”

“I…I’m sorry?” responded the doctor, bewildered.

“My street! I live on Shotwell! Lived here since the end of the Great War, through the Depression and even survived the racket of you folk building this hospital!”

He stopped for a moment to adjust his dentures with his tongue.

“But I wake up to find that I live on Getwell now! All cause some lady in Arkansas raised a stink in the Press-Scimitar”

“Sir, the post office is well aware of the change, you shouldn’t -”

“Ain’t the point!” he screeched “I was here first, goddammit!”

Memphis Note
The grounds of what is now the South Campus of the University of Memphis was originally used as a veteran’s hospital for World War 2 soldiers. Problem was, the street they were building it on was Shotwell, which was pointed out in a letter to the editor of the Press-Scimitar to not be a very appropriate name. So it was changed. To Getwell.