Clayton to be awash in Delta blues (Rory Block)

/Home/Blues Artists/Blues Women/Contemporary Blues Women/Contemporary Blues Women Articles

Clayton to be awash in Delta blues (Rory Block)
November 25, 2009
By CHRIS BROCK
Watertown Daily Times

CLAYTON — The SoZo Teen Center is bringing the blues to raise bucks.

Rory Block has committed her career to preserving the Delta blues tradition. Among accolades are those from USA Today, which called her "majestic ... a one-woman chorus" and from People magazine, which wrote, "If you like music steeped in tradition and genuine feeling, this is your woman."

She's scheduled to perform Saturday at the Clayton Opera House at a teen center benefit.

"I've been a fan of Rory since the 1990s," said SoZo Teen Center director Anthony R. Gullo.

Mr. Gullo started the wheels turning for the benefit after he saw Ms. Block perform over the summer at the Syracuse Blues Festival.

"We've done a couple of other benefits, but this is our first concert," Mr. Gullo said. "I thought Rory's style of blues and the Clayton Opera House setting would be the perfect combination."

He said the target audience for the concert isn't teens.

"It's more of an adult audience," he said. "Our target age is to hit some donors."

Mr. Gullo said the concert's profits will go to the teen center's building campaign fund. Next week the center will move from the basement of First Baptist Church to the Marcy Building. SoZo is a Greek word that means to save and make whole.

Hors d'oeuvres will be served by SoZo teens before the concert. Mr. Gullo said the food aspect is part of a larger plan for the center's new home, which he said will eventually have a café and catering business.

"If we can train these kids and get them in a situation to do the job well, we could build a reputation," Mr. Gullo said.

Ms. Block, in press materials, noted that in the first year of her life, in 1949, she lived in a shack in Neshanic, N.J., with no plumbing. Her parents, she said, were probably the "world's first hippies." When she was very young her mother sang to her at bedtime and her dad would often play the banjo or fiddle in the evening.

When she was a toddler, the family moved to what would become Greenwich Village in New York City where her father owned a sandal shop. At age 10, she was inspired to play guitar and picked up her mother's Galiano model.

Ms. Block became interested in the blues when she heard Stefan Grossman playing ragtime guitar in Washington Square Park in 1964 when she was 14.

"He gave me a record called 'Really The Country Blues' and that was the beginning of my love affair with the music," Ms. Block said in press materials.

She said there are other inspirations in her music, such as R&B, Motown, Gospel, old jazz and "even classical."

Ms. Block is known for writing extremely personal songs, with topics such as death, alcoholism, violence to women and loss of body image. Her live shows have received rave reviews. She doesn't perform with a set list and her fingers often start to bleed from her strenuous guitar playing.

"I get massive amounts of energy from the audience, and no matter what mood I may be in, I always connect with them within a song or two and from there the sense of being among friends actually overtakes me and I open up," Ms. Block said.

Her latest release is "Blues Walkin' Like a Man: A Tribute to Son House." Eddie James "Son" House (1902-1988) was known for his Delta and country blues.

"Listeners need to be advised that Rory Block is not photocopying these songs as much as she is assimilating them with her own voice, but in the pure and unique original voicings Son House invented," Michael G. Nastos wrote in All Music Guide about the CD.