Akin Babatundé and David Weiss in Lonesome Blues at The York Theatre Company at Saint Peter’s, New York. Picture: Carol Rosegg
Lonesome Blues continues at The York Theatre Company at Saint Peter’s, New York until 1 July 2018.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
A seminal treasure of African-American music gets vibrantly – sometimes thrillingly – aired in Lonesome Blues, a one-person evocation of the 1920s singer Blind Lemon Jefferson.
In his brief career, Blind Lemon, who died at age 36 in 1929, is seen as setting a template for such latter-day shakers and movers as the Beatles and Bob Dylan. He has been described by the celebrated playwright August Wilson as being “the voice of Black America at that moment”.
In Lonesome Blues, Blind Lemon is embodied with stunning authority by Akin Babatundé, who co-wrote the show with the writer and documentary film-maker Alan Govenar. It’s their latest iteration of their passion for telling the story of Blind Lemon, which has been realised in earlier stage works with ensemble casts and bearing the titles Blind Lemon: Prince of Country Blues and Blind Lemon Blues. Perhaps because of this, Lonesome Blues, directed by Katherine Owens, hits the stage with a grand assuredness about what it wants to say and wants to do.
As the two authors tell us in a programme note, the show is “not a literal bio-musical, but instead is a poetic rendering of Blind Lemon’s memories”. It takes place on the day he died, and we find him sitting in the freezing December cold of a Chicago railroad station waiting for his chauffeur to show up and get him on a train to take him home to see his mother in Texas. However, as we finally learn, it’s a train carrying his casket. In the show’s final moment, he sings: “There’s just one kind favour I ask of you/Just see that my grave/Is kept clean.”
As the authors indicate in their programme note, the narrative is fairly short on specifics. But between the many songs and snatches of songs – most of them written by Blind Lemon – we learn how he was born blind, one of seven children on a Texas farm; how he sang on a street corner in Dallas, travelled with the blues singer Lead Belly and eventually was discovered and signed by a Chicago record company.
We hear of his marriage to a woman in Texas, a woman who never accompanied on his many trips for recordings in Chicago, and his interactions with a number of his performing contemporaries. We also hear of the alienation he felt as a blind person and by extension as a black man.
“Didn’t matter how hard we worked, how hot we got, how much corn we plucked or cotton we picked…nothing changes,” he says, before going into the song ‘Disgusted Blues’.
But it’s the music that is the heart of the show, and Babatundé delivers it with a rich musicality to match his own impressive physical proportions. His voice can go to a somewhat unearthly falsetto, used with especially good effect in the traditional gospel ‘Motherless Child’, and then burrow deep with a thunderous baritone calling up the trumpets of heaven as in the fierce ‘That Black Snake Moan’.
He can also be sexy, as in ‘Christmas Eve Blues’, singing, “Just the day before Christmas,/Let me bring you a present tonight/I’m gonna be your Santa Claus/Even if my whiskers ain’t white.”
During the course of the show, Babatundé also takes on the personas of others turning up in his story, including some of the era’s female blues singers, such as Lillian Miller and Hattie Hudson, giving more than a hint of their jaunty seductiveness.
Throughout, Babatundé receives splendid accompaniment by guitarist David Weiss. He is seated unobtrusively in a darkened side of James Morgan’s set, backed by a building wall of weather-beaten brick. Steve Woods’ lighting shifts tellingly with many of the songs, heightening the mood.
If the show falters in any way, it’s that it threatens at times to become survey-like as it moves through its songs. The programme lists 32 titles, and thus only a small number of them are allowed to build to a compelling climax. Fewer titles, and more songs delivering a palpable dramatic arc might well give this smartly small-scale show an even richer theatrical texture.
Nevertheless, Lonesome Bluesimpresses one mightily with the scope and feeling of its subject’s art. Blind Lemon’s expressions of the highs and lows of his own humanity should make even the most lonesome in his audience feel less so.
Ron Cohen
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