Blues for Billy

By Joseph Hesch

Billy was a true Blues man,

the happiest purveyor of the downtrodden

black man's art I ever knew.

He riffed licks by the cotton-picking bagful,

bending strings to pitch-perfect extremes

and bending hearts as if caressed

like the body of that Strat

he hugged to his own.

Growling or shouting,

crooning or oozing a low moan,

his bloodshot angel eyes

glowed beatific no matter where he turned

personal hells into harmonic heavens.

The empties, brown and green,

stacked on the Marshall at his back

stood deep like the fans, white and black

who came for the show and left for the better.

They called him Wild Bill and

the wild truly lived in him,

poking and pulling his gentle soul

over the boundaries of too much and too late

into a darkness soon too awful and too awfully soon.

That night my little brother died,

we all floated down tear tracks

to that place I'm told the Blues was born,

a delta of sadness, memory and 12-bar deliverence.

Thursday would have been my brother Bill's 55th birthday. He was a brilliant self-taught musician, regarded as one of the best Blues guitarists in our neck of the musical woods. The experts tell me he would be regarded as such outside of upstate New York and western New England, too. But here with Julie, Christine and Suzanne was Home. He died suddenly seven years ago and our world is sadder and darker now. Musicians with whom he shared stages still note in their bios they played with "the late Wild Bill Hesch." I played with him too, just not the Blues. This one's for you, Bill. Hope I hit some of the right notes. I'm not used to solos.