Chapter 149: Writing Inspiration from John Mooney, Bluesman

I had never heard of John Mooney until I heard him play last Sunday. This was at JazzFest, in New Orleans, a wonderful music – and this being New Orleans food and drink – festival that features more musicians that anyone can keep track of, let alone hear. 

There is an array of stages and tents spread across a vast racetrack and one of them is devoted to the blues. I became a fan while living in Chicago forty-five years ago where, lucky me, I was able to hear the great bluesmen and women who, late in life, were still performing with the gusto of younger musicians. What I could not appreciate then was what the years brought to their music and how that applied to writing, as well.

It took seeing and hearing John Mooney to begin to understand.

Mooney appeared on stage and took a seat where he would remain throughout his set. He was 69 and bald. He wore black wraparound sunglasses and I thought, incorrectly, that he might have been blind. A long earring dangled from his left ear and he had an elaborate tattoo on his right forearm. He was husky in a way that suggested a man not necessarily in the peak of health.

Then he began to play. 

Rather than try to explain his music – it never quite works to describe in words an art form that speaks in another language – have a listen and give it a couple of minutes.

 

Mooney’s playing does not explode with the first note. It builds and as I listened I began to sense a complexity that deepened as his songs unspooled. Something was going on here that I found ever more powerful and moving. Actually, a lot was going on, and it was all about the years.

Writers, like musicians, place great stock on experience, on having lived long enough to have witnessed and felt all that life presents that is good and bad, sorrowful and joyful, thrilling and heartbreaking. Life informs the work; how could it not? This feels especially apt for the blues, which is so much about loss, heartbreak, struggle and pain – as befits music that emerged from enslavement and the Jim Crow Mississippi Delta. 

But that is only part of it.

I began to search for John Mooney and began filling in the pieces of his biography: born in New Jersey, left home at 15, fell under the musical sway of the legendary bluesman Son House and after a disappointing sojourn in California made his way to New Orleans. He played with legends like Junior Wells and Professor Longhair. Then came a broken marriage, drugs and, later, three children whom he boasts about. He never became a star. I found a 1993 recording

that captures a much younger man in the handsome cover image and in the playing. He is very good. His talent and skills are apparent. But he is not yet John Mooney, not the one I heard in New Orleans.

I am an uneducated listener; I cannot play guitar. I needed to test my thinking and so got in touch with old friend, Jim Oakar, a guitarist I met years earlier when he taught my younger child to play. I sent Jim samples of Mooney’s playing now and then and asked what he thought.

“He's awesome!” he wrote. “I especially like how he duplicates his voice on guitar. You can tell he is a veteran. I can tell by his musicality and his guitar playing. Playing with a slide and picking with your left hand is hard. He has complete control of the instrument. He makes it look easy. And his solos are not as composed. Usually I plan things like solos out almost composed and make sure every note is right. He approaches each song like it's the first time playing it.”

There was a particular poignancy in Jim’s response. He has had to re-learn to play an instrument he’s been playing since he was a child after being stricken a few  years ago with Guillain Barre Syndrome, which wreaks havoc on the nervous system. Jim is in his late 40s and things that once came as easily and naturally as breathing are a struggle.

“I am re-learning how hard it is to play again and everything feels forced,” he wrote. “But the hands eventually get used to it. I am learning the difficulties physically and mentally of playing on that level. There are still many songs I wrote that I still can't play! On one hand it is frustrating. On the other, something to strive for.”

Jim’s description of this arduous process of re-learning the guitar – and what he had to say about John Mooney – brought to mind the stages in a writer’s evolution. The early recording of Mooney’s playing felt like a young writer’s voice – vibrant and new.  Just as young musicians have so much to offer, I believe that young writers should never think they have to wait to begin writing; they have things to say right now, things best said when their voices are still taking shape. 

But in the development of that voice there comes a point where the speed of its evolution slows and the voice, for all intents and purposes, settles into being what it is. When that happens, it becomes an instrument for a writer to do with what he or she wishes. The inevitable creative struggles are more about what you want to say than in how you want to say it. As Jim wrote about Mooney’s playing  – he has complete control of the instrument.

As that begins to happen, a whole new kind of learning begins. I know this because, as I wrote in the first chapter of Writerland, it was only after I’d returned to writing after stepping away for several years that I began to see that over time I’d become a more mature writer – less self-conscious about the prose, per se, and more aware of what I wanted to convey on the page.

Even as my writing became in certain ways simpler – a result of not trying so hard – the content grew in depth and complexity. Where once I was satisfied to make a single point stylishly, now I was focusing on the subtleties, the nuances that my older writer’s voice made easier to achieve.

I like to think I got better, but that is not really the point. Over time I believe I had gotten a little wiser, which meant greater clarity in seeing things in all their maddening but fascinating shades of gray.

I suppose that is what drew me so powerfully to John Mooney’s playing. We bring to music – and really to all art, be it for the ear or eye – our imaginations. Our imaginations, in turn, fill in the blanks that artists leave for us so that we can connect with their work.

So it was that as I listened to John Mooney play the blues, I heard a voice, an older person’s saying, I’ve got this, finally. And I have things I want to tell you that I’ve learned along the way.

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