Street Views

The Signalman show is a blog companion to the podcast audio

  Hey there, and happy Monday!  Wow, what a time in Richmond, VA!  Embarked on my monthly trek to The River City to DJ for the retired soldiers at the VA home, host a broom guitar-building clinic at Sam Ash music, and of course to play some street music in Carytown, the art district of the city.  Here's a little vignette for ya:


"I want somebody to tell me, what is the soul of a man?"  A dollar for each of us sat in the pot, our voices gathering in the fading day, the alley behind me adding a streetlife symphony echo.  Blind Willie Johnson songs sound best at dusk when there's only an indifferent audience shuffling on down the street, away, away, tepid.  His "real kazoo", not a plastic one like the kids use, added to his harmonica and cigar box guitar as we both strained to pay tribute to the long-gone bluesman, dead like the noon long passed.

  The song ended.  Time passed as it always does.  I sat next to my friend who left his legs in Fallujah, as the people walked by above us on the dirty sidewalk.  We talked about war and life and PTSD and helping family and target practice and fear and girls and a system that failed.  His girlfriend showed up, he went on down the line, and I headed back north, haunted.  There is no moral to the story...no tidy lesson found in the confusion of the cigarette butts we sat among.  And that's the point.