Want to sing the blues? Try living it

If you want to hear the blues, head down to Bayfront Festival Park where the bluesfest continues in full swing today.

If you want to see the blues, you might try outside the CHUM building at First Avenue West and Second Street any morning just after 8, when the doors of its overnight shelter open.

Saturday finds Scott Norgren, 37, with a story sounding like blues lyrics in search of backup players.

"First day I got to Duluth, I left my wallet in a cab," he says of his journey from seasonal work at a Grand Marais fish house.

"So me and my 63-year-old mother had to come out here and go to CHUM. I have my dog over with my mom at a boarding lodge. When I have him, I have to pretty much sleep outside because I can't sleep with him here."

That's the sporting life compared to Anthony Williams.

"I just got out of prison and they just left me here, just ditched me," the Duluth native says. "No place to go, nothing. They let me out in some gray shorts and a tee shirt and down the road I go."

Though it doesn't get much more hard-luck than that -- one definition of the blues is a bad situation with little hope of getting better -- Williams' "down-the-road-I-go" is upbeat. So are the others trading stories and smokes, with the bluesfest's $40 tickets making for a good laugh.

"We're not going to hear it for free," Williams chuckles.

Oh, yes, we can, says Cynthia, who declines to give her last name in relating her travels between Duluth and Minneapolis, via California and Vegas.

"We can sit down there on the sidewalk and listen to it for free. It's so loud," she says.

"I like the blues," she continues, "but it would take probably about 50 million takes to get through my story. I've been through a lot of (expletive). I need to go back to Minneapolis. I have housing. I've been here since Wednesday. I ended up in the hospital and came here."

The hospital mention leads her to a joke about a pregnancy exam: "They said, 'this will just be a little prick.' "

E-mail me if you really want to know the next line.

It's raunchy, but hey, that's the blues again. And it's easy sharing on a gorgeous Saturday just after breakfast and a good night's sleep. Or if not so good, at least a bed indoors -- though it's not quite Fitger's. Or even Days Inn.

"It's about 30 to 40 men and one bathroom. That's hell by itself if you ask me," says Antwane Ross, throwing cold water on anyone romanticizing the blues life.

And that's a reality no one would want, despite whatever appeal slumming seems to have (think Ringo Starr's "Got to pay your dues if you want to sing the blues.") Unless you think the blues is just slick guitar riffs and 12-bar chord progressions, who in their right mind would want to live that life?

I'm sure there's street cred in the mixed bag of Bluefest performers: a shaved-head tattooed woman, a miniskirted 30-something from Serbia, and even an old black man or two in this art form rooted in Africa and raised in slavery, the ultimate bad condition with no chance of hope.

But maybe at CHUM there is some.

"Oh, believe me, I had the blues when I first got here," says Tavareous Williams of Duluth and Washington, D.C.

"I made (an effort) to get a job, trying to get out of here. Work 10 hours a day. It's going pretty swell. Last night I was working at the Radisson (parking lot), so all the blues people filled up the parking lot. (In the morning) before then, I was working at a packaging company in Superior."

That work, through a temp agency, had him going from 9:30 a.m. to 11 at night -- technically too late for the shelter cutoff, but, he says, "if you're doing right, they cut you some slack."

He even got a $50 tip from a bluesfest patron. And he still has dreams.

"I want to invest in a diamond company since diamonds are forever. That's my goal. And try to open my own art gallery. I'm only 24," he says with an infectious smile.

It spreads. Norgren laughs with him at the thought of breaking the cycle of hopelessness.

"Eventually," he says.

Robin Washington is editor of the News Tribune. He may be reached at rwashington@duluthnews.com .