Cedell Davis - Boogie Chillen

Cedell Davis was born to play the blues. No way was he going to let a little thing like a severe case of polio at nine years old keep his voice and guitar silent. The ailment forced him to relearn playing the guitar as a left-hander. He flipped his guitar upside down Jimi Hendrix-style long before Jimi entered this realm of existence and he used a table knife to navigate the fretboard with his right hand as he picked and strummed with his left. The sound was harsh at times, and sounded out of tune often, but once you got used to it, you heard what he was saying. It was raw, and it was pure, and it was true.

From his bio at Fat Possum Records, written by Robert Palmer:

Cedell Davis was born Ellis Davis on June 9, 1927, in Helena, then a booming river town on the Arkansas bank of the Mississippi. He grew up there and in the upper Mississippi Delta around eight miles south of Tunica, on the E.M. Hood plantation, where his brother lived. Together with one of his childhood friends, Isaiah Ross (future Sun recording artist Dr. Ross the Harmonica Boss), Cedell began playing blues, first harmonica, then some guitar.

Then tragedy struck -- during his ninth and tenth years he grappled with severe polio. He returned to Helena, to his mother, who was locally renowned as a healer, though she worked as a cook, and there he began the painful process of relearning, in fact rethinking the guitar, which he could no longer play in the conventional manner. "It took me about three years," he recalls. "I was right- handed, but I couldn't use my right hand, so I had to turn the guitar around; I play left-handed now. But I still needed something to slide with, and my mother had these knives, a set of silverware, and I kinda swiped one of 'em."

This was the beginning of a guitar style that is utterly unique, in or out of blues. The knife-handle on the strings produces uneven pressure, which results in a welter of metal-stress harmonic transients and a singular tonal plasticity. Some people who hear CeDell's playing for the first time think it's out of tune, but it would be more accurate to say he plays in an alternative tuning. Because the way he hears and plays intervals and chords is consistent and systematic.

Cedell began playing around the Delta as a young man, and over the years he continued to work in some of the world's most dangerous dives. Somehow he learned to project a kind of presence that defuses violence, keeping him miraculously whole amid raging chaos. There is something Buddah-like about that presence, a sense of having learned to deal with a physically violent world with his mind. It also enables him to compose and sequence verses for new songs on the spot and hold them in his memory for as long as necessary.

Cedell was a warrior and a survivor in a rough world, and he brought his music home to countless audiences, be they paying fans sitting in a venue or drunken patrons in a roadhouse looking for sex and violence. He was a bluesman, and he didn't compromise.