YOUNGSTOWN STATE UNIVERSITY Festival gets the blues

By RON COLE
VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- In its 23-year history, Youngstown State University's English Festival hasn't seen anything quite like Guy Davis.
The three-day festival, which attracts about 3,000 students from 160 schools in northeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania, is recognized nationally for encouraging reading among young people.
Nearly 60,000 students have attended over the years to compete in writing contests and hear lectures from some of the nation's top authors of young adult literature.
"This year, we decided to do something a little different," said Dr. Julia Gergits, YSU English professor and festival co-chairman.
Presentation: Guy Davis, 48, a blues guitarist who's part Blind Willie McTell and part Garrison Keillor, is one of three featured speakers-performers at the festival this week, the first musician to play such a prominent role.
"It's just storytelling in a different way," Gergits said. "We're hoping it will get the kids to be more open-minded."
Davis, son of actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, wooed students Wednesday on the festival's opening day with an intimate, educational, toe-tapping, gut-wrenching journey through the history, mechanics and humor of the blues.
The hour-long performance in Bliss Hall's Spotlight Theater featured Davis seated on a wooden chair in front of a lone microphone playing the harmonica and guitar and singing blues old and new.
What he did: He sang songs and told stories about chickens having egg-laying contests, prisoners escaping chain gangs, scheming record producers, whiskey-spiked lemonade, hobos sitting around campfires, and devastating floods in Georgia.
Between songs, he sipped from a bottle of water.
"I had a friend that used to manufacture something that looked like this," he said, holding up the bottle. "Didn't taste like this though. It had a celestial name -- moonshine."
He showed students the difference between the hard, driving beat of the Delta blues and the more subtle, bouncing beat of the Piedmont blues.
"A lot of times you can identify a bluesman by the way he plays his guitar and the way he uses his thumb," he said.
Other achievements: Davis' interests in the blues goes beyond the guitar. In 1993, he performed off-Broadway as legendary blues player Robert Johnson in "Robert Johnson: Trick the Devil." The next year, his one-man show "In Bed with the Blues: The Adventures of Fishy Waters" debuted off-Broadway.
Davis also wrote "Mudsurfing," an award-winning collection of three short stories, and performed and co-wrote the music for an Emmy-winning film called "To Be a Man."
When Davis opened the English Festival performance for questions, one student asked where he's from.
"New York," he said. "The only cotton I ever picked was my underwear off the floor."
Davis' resume' also includes four CDs, the latest titled "Butt Naked Free." The title, he said, came from his 10-year-old son, who heard him playing a song from the CD one day.
"He said to me, 'Daddy, that song should be called running butt naked free through the mud with no shoes on and no socks,' " Davis said.
The festival continues today and Friday. Results from festival contests will appear on the Education Page in the April 14 edition of The Vindicator.