Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
“Blues ain’t nothin’ but the truth,” says Big George Brock. For more than 70 years, his harmonica licks have been piercing the air and tying it into ribbons, and his deep, throaty voice has been making all kinds of pain bearable.
He started life in a sharecropping family in Mississippi, and at 8, he was picking “cotton and corn and anything that grew out of the ground. I’d sing the blues out in that field and feel good,” he says. “It made the day go faster.”
And I remember his song: Talk about hard times, y’all don’t know what a hard time is. And I know he’s right.
“I come up in the hard time,” he says. You had to measure your food—flour, sugar, and beans—and you couldn’t cook no more than what the white people wanted you to cook.” I ask why the unfairness he saw around him didn’t turn him bitter and hateful. “Didn’t have no other choice, baby, but to go through that. I didn’t hate nobody, because I figured there was a better day somewhere in the world for me. I didn’t think people were meant to live like that.”
Now Hard Times is the title of a documentary about his life. If he were making his own film, he says, “I’d start it when I was 12, singin’ on my mother and father’s porch, and take it from Mississippi to St. Louis. I came here in 1950. The things I went through down there, I didn’t go through here. I could live like I wanted to. Nobody measured my food.”
He boxed for a while, got so good he knocked out Sonny Liston. But blues made him feel even more powerful. He played alongside Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Albert King, and he owned a series of blues clubs in St. Louis. In one of them, the Club Caravan, he kicked a man out for fighting with his girlfriend, and the man came back near closing time with a gun, fired at Brock, and sent a spray of bullets through the wall, killing Brock’s wife. “I ain’t over it yet,” he says.
I know people who’d tell him to play more cheerful music; people who say the blues are depressing. “People who can say that, they never had no problems,” he retorts. “They don’t look back on their life and see where they come from. Blues have helped a lot of people. Back in the day when they didn’t have nothin’, the blues helped them get across that bad feeling.” The music’s like medicine, he adds. “I can be sick, like I am now, but when I go on the bandstand, I don’t have a pain. I feel real good.”
Asked how he defines the blues, he says, “Well, baby, the blues is somethin’ that will be here forever. The tunes it’s connected to, it’ll never go away. People can change them, but it ain’t the same. They take the sound away, and they take the meaning away.
“I don’t want to start out singin’ the blues and wind up telling jokes,” he says. “That’s not the place for it. I’m going to keep the blues the way they are supposed to be for the rest of my life. Just the blues, not a lot of talk, not a lot of jazz and stuff mixin’ up.
“If you hear the real blues and it don’t get to you, you’re in the wrong place,” he finishes. “The blues and the truth bring the same feeling.”
