Clarksdale was crawling with blues harmonica players today. I said hello to half a dozen players from the forum--I trust they will identify themselves here--and stopped in at Deak's shop.
Richard "Rip Lee" Pryor, Snooky Pryor's son, watched me and Shine and Alan do our thing for a while, then came up and introduced himself. Later I insisted that he sit in, and he tore the place up with a shuffle blues and a slow blues. Huge, huge energy and groove. (He played right on the vocal mic.)
Annie Raines sat in on "Scratch My Back" just before him and did her usual fine stuff.
Jon Gindick dropped a dollar in the tip bucket at one point and ambled off.
At the end of the afternoon, as we were packing up, William Clarke's widow, Jeannette Clarke Lodovici came up and said that her current husband, Joe Lodovici, had enjoyed my playing. I told her a couple of stories about Bill and when I mentioned that he'd downed a 48 oz. Olde English Ale the first time I saw him back in the late 1980s, she laughed. "That's all he drank," she said.
