Where would you be if you were Thomas the Train Engine and you could not toot? You'd be way, way north down the road of the blues. Yeah, you betcha, you'd be in Duluth! Like at the bottom of the very bottom of an inland sea where shipwrecked sailors whisper, "Oh, say, can you see."
Can you see the silver-haired grandma tapping her toes to Super Chicken and the Fighting Cocks as she changes her grandson's diaper on the hill in front of you?
Can you see the lift bridge-looking, show-stealing, festival stage sitting grand and commanding as a dry docked ship?
Can you see the balding grandpa cork-wheeling across the soft, green, OK'd-for-croquet lawn?
Can you hear the bands alternating sets between the two stages? Can you feel the laughter, the love, born of the blues, flowing in all ages all around you?
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Sit and gawk, or stand up, stretch, and talk with your friends between sets. Once in a while, get up out of your lawn chair and walk to the white tent where blues tunes play up close, just a few dance steps from your bayside hill spot.
Bare-footed, a baby or a knight or a lady: Can you taste the
summer-sweet brew of the blues drinking you?
Smoking axes, horns, pianos, drums and moaning voices groove our red and green realities into the midnight-at-noon color of the blues. A laker blows its riffs and cakewalks the waves under the lift bridge and into the lake. We float away the day where Thomas might be if he could not toot or where we would be if our ears
didn't open the music in us until we saw ourselves blowing in the blues -- and the blues blowing in Duluth!
William Tecku
Gordon
