Post 59

***100th Blog Post! Whooooo!!!!***

OK. I was going to write about how much I enjoyed blues band practice yesterday, but now I find myself in a pickle. As I was prepping to write this post, a colleague commented on how she likes me because I'm a very free and open person. It was at this point that I then felt compelled to mention that this was all thanks to God. It turns out my colleague is also a woman of faith, and we just had a wonderful conversation about the importance of God in our lives, but being short on time, we've made plans to go out one evening and talk about our testimonies. Awesome!
God is good.

Now, as for the blues band, it turns out that we are one member short, because the harmonica player who also sang as a sort of interim vocalist, no longer wants to play with us. He feels that with my addition to the group, it has taken on a direction that is not faithful to blues and he's not really diggin' it.

I'm sorry to say it, but I sense some male chauvinism in this. Blues has been a heavily male-dominated musical tradition, yes. And as a young woman I am certainly not going to sing the way Muddy Waters and Junior Wells did. But come on, let's not forget that women can sing the blues too, and we have had many an impetus to at that.

I am stretching as a vocalist here, but now that I've started to listen to the female versions of some of these sogns, I'm realizing that my interpretations are not that far off from theirs. In the group I am not going to sing from a male perspective (except for "I Got a Woman". too good to mess with, hehe) because that's just not authentic. I wouldn't be singing a blues I could relate to, and it wouldn't be fun.

We all are learning a bit of give and take and looking to bring our styles and preferences together, understanding that some will have to be set aside. For me, that means we don't do all jazz pieces, and for them, that means learning a few jazz pieces. For all of us it means time studying and crafting areas of our talents and abilities that we might not have otherwise, and that my friends, makes this all worth it. :D