VERY SUPERSTITIOUS...WHEN YOU BELIEVE IN THINGS YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND... YOU WILL SUFFER~ Stevie Wonder…
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| Once Upon A Time In The Delta Blues Folklore |
This is the story of the cat, that is responsible for the origin of the music known as the Blues.
It all started way down in the swamps of Louisiana...
There was an old voodoo woman who owned a cat. The cat's name was Woodrow. Woodrow was a black cat. (If you're superstitious, this is important to note.) The old hags name I don't remember.
The important thing to note about her was that she never got any loving, because of the fact that she was a voodoo woman, she was spooky, and not only that, she looked like she fell out of an ugly tree, and hit every branch on the way down!!!
Well, as the saying goes, "Every dog has his day", the old hag scored a date!. This was not to be a cat's day.
She had managed to get an old town rummy (superstitious I'm afraid) to come out to her shack for a drink... Little did he know her plan was to spike his whiskey with a love potion that would make him see her as a beautiful woman and be blindly in love with her forever!
The old rummy was just about to do the magic shot when curiosity got the best of Woodrow and he decided to make his presence known... needless to say, the superstitious rummy, who was already on pins-and-needles, freaked... and all hell broke loose! ...EXIT STAGE LEFT!!!
...This is where the story of the Blues begins...
For punishment, the voodoo woman put a spell on Woodrow.
For having caused her to lose the only shot she had at love, Woodrow would now suffer the fate of always falling in love and losing his woman. No man, or cat, should have such a fate... Woodrow did.
Part of the spell was that Woodrow was to become human, so that he could feel the real sorrow. The only grace was that he could choose the time to be human. Time went on...
Of course Woodrow was kicked out of the shack, so he decided to travel. Wondering up the Mississippi river sounded like the thing to do.
The mojo working on Woodrow was pretty strong. The sorrow he was feeling was even stronger. Such feelings couldn't be contained forever, sooner or later they had to be expressed.
One day ... Woodrow found an old guitar in a back alley... "Yeah", he thought. Sitting down by the river, strumming a few chords, and singing about his sorrow was the thing to do. This became quite a pastime, along with a few shots of moonshine of course. Always being curious as to what lay around the next bend in the river, Woodrow traveled north. As I said, the spell was wicked. So wicked, it was said he glowed sometimes!
Of course there were people all along the river banks, and Woodrow took advantage of a free meal and a place on the porch to nap. (Cats like to do that you know!) He hung out on peoples porches that later on went by names such as ,Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, Leadbelly, Blind Melon Jackson, Hambone Wilson, Squeaky Jones, Memphis Minnie, Cat Scratch Suzie, and so on...
Are you getting the picture yet? Yes, Woodrow's mojo was so strong that his "Blues Power", rubbed off on whoever he was around.
No one knows for sure if Woodrow ever took on his human life yet. Some theorize that he was Robert Johnson. I say no, because Robert would not have had to sell his soul to the devil, to learn how to play guitar. He might have been Jimi Hendrix!... (It would explain a lot about Jimi.)
PS. "Tarmoon" became part of Woodrow's name as people often described Woodrow "With fur black as tar and green eyes as big as the moon."
"The Blues ain't nothin' but a good man feeling bad, over losing a woman he once was with"... ~SmokeHouse Brown~
[This story is a prelude to a story spanning 100 years of Delta Folklore — Once Upon A Time In The Delta]
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