Guy Davis’ inaugural trip to Canada took place sometime in the mid-1990s. He made his first friends north of the border in Calgary, but soon began exploring British Columbia. The New Yorker has travelled all over the province, including out to Vancouver Island, but it’s been a long time.
That’s why he’s heading back to the Sea to Sky corridor for an Oct. 7 show courtesy of Arts Whistler Live!
“I want to reconnect,” says the two-time Grammy Award nominee. “A lot of what I’ve been doing over this past part of a decade is going to seem new to the folks I see out there.”
Davis is known most prominently as a blues musician, but he’s not limited to one genre. Also in his repertoire are many classic songs and a full array of banjo music—Davis first heard the banjo at a children’s summer camp run by John Seeger (brother of American folk musician Pete Seeger) and asked his father for one immediately.
Nowadays, Davis tours with a six-string guitar and a five-string banjo, leaving behind the 12-stringer he used to take on the road.
Giving his all
It’s only fitting that Davis has made a life in the performing arts world. His parents were the late Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis: actors and writers who, like their only son, used their careers as a platform for social activism. Despite achieving considerable renown, Ruby and Ossie hesitated to commit to long Hollywood projects that would keep them away from family, so they spent much of their lives onstage at various churches, schools, hospitals, and civic centres.
One vital lesson Davis learned from his mom and dad was to always put his best foot forward.
“People who come to see you deserve every bit of energy that you can put into your performance,” he says. “I remember years ago, sitting in the antechamber of a humongous civic gymnasium that had a dividing wall. I sat on the outside of that wall—the stage area was on the inside—and I watched people walk in from the street. I made up my mind that those people who are investing their time and their money in me deserve every bit of what I got to give them.
“I’ve never seen my folks give less than a full-hearted show, and … it [dawned] on me that that is what I’ve got to do.”
Indeed, Davis is an earnest musician who loves to engage with audiences. He’s always been fascinated with sound, no matter how strange, and as a boy would hold the handle of a butter knife out over the edge of a table and press it down before letting it vibrate. It was an amazing phenomenon to him—less so to his mother.
At the same time, Davis was never one for formal music education, and quit playing piano well before his two sisters did. He figures he’s had maybe five guitar lessons in his whole life. Somehow, the 71-year-old is now the only one of them making his livelihood in music.
He’s truly a self-taught talent who has spent thousands of hours sitting on his bed, playing notes over and over.
“Like [American guitarist] John Fahey said: ‘the music goes back through the guitar right into your belly, right into your spine and travels up and fills your body.’ Fahey died younger than he should have, and I think that fact gives even more weight to his words,” Davis says. “People would show me things: patterns, chords, what have you, and I just found it great to play by myself and feel the voice of the guitar.”
The magic of stories
Davis is, at his core, a storyteller. Music is his medium, and the lessons found in history and social injustices are frequently part of his message. He’s always been drawn to blues, in large part because of the genre’s origins in the Jim Crow era of the United States. From his perspective, blues is fundamental to African American subculture, and its themes represent the survivors of segregation.
That said, Davis also believes in the power of storytelling to unite people regardless of race, religion, class or any other demographic trait.
“There are stories of racism that can be told, I believe, without making white people feel isolated and terrible about it,” he opines. “I think that if you tell it in human terms, all people will get some sense of what it is to be a human being, and what it is to be denied the opportunity to live as a human being.”
Of course, it’s not all about the hard-hitting stuff with Davis, who balances out his more convicting material with softer songs like “We All Need More Kindness In This World” and funky tracks like “Kokomo Kidd.”
“Stories, to me, have always been magic,” he explains. “I’m not talking about that spooky-dooky kind of magic, like making a bunny rabbit appear out of a hat, but the kind of magic where you hear words that cause you to visualize everything that’s being spoken about, and there’s an emotional connection. It’s a kind of magic that can actually be healing.”
For tickets and more information, visit artswhistler.com.