T-Bone Walker
Call it Stormy Monday (but Tuesday is just as bad)

For blues lovers: Stormy Monday, Duane Allman and others...

They call it stormy monday, but tuesday's just as bad
They call it stormy monday, but tuesday's not joking. It's the first line of my lyrics.

They call it stormy monday, but tuesday's just as bad
Wednesday's worse, and thursday's also sad

They call it stormy monday, but tuesday's not joking. Wednesday is worse, and even Thursday is sad. This is the complete text of my first verse.
My name is Stormy Monday, but my full title is Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad), with parentheses around Tuesday.

Let me introduce myself. I am one of the most famous blues in history. My own history is made of glory and success. I was born shortly after the end of World War II, I have crossed the decades to arrive at today, old but still in good health. I traveled all over America, then I crossed the ocean to come here to you in Europe. In the end, I played all over the world. I've been performed thousands of times by thousands of musicians of all kinds, from great stars to melancholic piano bar pianists on cruise ships. Even jazz musicians have courted me. Let's not talk about the rock youth. That was love at first sight.

I would like to share with you the most beautiful moments of my life because there is nothing more sad than unshared glory. If you will forgive my tendency to ramble (due to my age), I would like to browse through my photo album with you. Tap my finger on photos of old musicians who have interpreted me over fifty years, the most beautiful ones. Remember some of their stories. Make me happy, stay with me just a few minutes.

I am the son of a musician named T-Bone Walker, born in Texas in 1910. T-Bone was half African-American and half Cherokee Indian. One might think that his DNA carried a load of revenge, of resentment towards America that had deported his paternal ancestors and exterminated his maternal ones.

And yet no. He spent his life giving rhythm and fun to Americans. He became one of the prominent figures of different blues currents, from jump blues, the more lively blues influenced by big jazz orchestras, to west coast-blues, the more modern one where in the 40s they were already doing solos with electric guitar. T-Bone was a virtuoso of this instrument. He could jump and land in a split with the guitar behind his back without stopping playing. And play well. Once though, in the early seventies, he got stuck because of that split, and they had to take him to the emergency room. He crushed his testicles, I can't even think about it. From that time he calmed down and I never saw the split during the solo again.

His style eventually influenced many musicians. B.B. King had chosen the guitar as his instrument after attending a T-Bone Walker concert, and even Jimi Hendrix took from T-Bone the applause-grabbing theatricality of virtuoso acrobatics during the solo (playing with teeth or behind the back).

I came to light in a recording studio in Hollywood in 1947, sponsored by the Black and White label. T-Bone, accompanied by a small combo of 5 musicians, arranged me as a blues in twelve eighths, with a metronome speed of 66 beats per minute. He arranged me in pure West Coast Blues style, complete with an electric guitar solo. I really couldn't explain how it happened, after all, the blues all resemble each other. Yet my 78 rpm record flew off the shelves like hotcakes and made the fortune of T-Bone Walker, who from that moment was always identified as "Mister Stormy Monday".

The eagle flies on friday, and saturday I go out to play

The eagle flies on friday, and saturday I go out to play.

Yes, the eagle flies on friday, and saturday I go out to play
sunday I go to church, then I kneel down and pray

The eagle flies on friday, and on saturday I go out to play. Sunday I go to church, then I kneel down and pray. Remember that I am a blues: everything in me is slang and double-entendre. All my text must be interpreted in the blues slang. The storm of the first verse, raging over the first 4 days of the week, is obviously not a meteorological condition, but the sacrifice of daily life, the fatigue of work aggravated by the agony for the lack of someone. But this prevailing misfortune finally finds a respite on friday when the eagle flies, a slang expression meaning payday. Finally on friday the money arrives and on saturday you play. You spend everything just not to think about your troubles.

The eagle's flight, however, only brings a truce. Sunday is for prayer, when you return to reflect on the real reason for the anguish, that painful worm that makes life difficult, "stormy". And in the blues, the pain almost always reflects the siege of an absence. Absence of luck or money to live happily, but much more often the absence of a loved one, dead or gone. Traditionally, the blues corresponds exactly to the demon himself, come to poison life. But he leaves at the moment he is sung. In short, we are talking about a musical language that, in its original form, is akin to an exorcistic ritual.

So I entered the repertoire of many black musicians. My fate could have been to end forgotten, like many old blues, but in September 1961, in Nashville, Tennessee, my story took an unexpected turn. In a recording studio was the musician Bobby Bland, rather well-known in the black music circles, working on an album. During a work break, he asked his guitarist to try Stormy Monday, just for fun. The bassist placed his tuna and artichoke sandwich on the Marshall amplifier. They tried me by sketching my chords, but the guitarist, almost involuntarily, made an important modification to my harmonic structure. A chord change from major to minor. The new version pleased Bobby Bland so much that he wanted it on his new album.

To tell you the truth, Bobby Bland's version isn't much. Nothing memorable. But the harmonic modification they had made turned out to be decisive for my destiny. They had made me slightly more melancholy, more listenable, but also more personal and original. With that little "plastic surgery" to my features, I was now more appealing to an extremely wider audience than the narrow blues audience. Sometimes a little plastic surgery, a little tweak here or there, is enough to open you to a new season of youth. That's exactly what happened to me.

In those years (we're at the beginning of the '60s), a generation of very young rock artists was raging in Europe, the so-called British invasion. There were these guys who were playing the new word, rock, and in the recipe for this new music, a large amount of black music was poured. But it was not mixed evenly. There was the melodic rock side less influenced by black music, the beat pop of the Beatles, but then there was a side much closer to black music, where groups like the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton's Cream, or Eric Burdon's Animals operated. Pushing even further, you would arrive right on the frontier ground, the frontier between white and black music. With the blessing of those musicians who were experimenting crossover between blues and rock, positioned like a Checkpoint Charlie on that great frontier, the black Freddy King on one side and the white Alexis Korner on the other, I crossed the wall and entered the rock world in a big way, a world of young, passionate, and ambitious musicians.

In England, young bands began to play me, such as John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Eric Clapton's Cream, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, even Jethro Tull. Adorable white teenagers in miniskirts kept my rhythm with nylon-stockinged legs bought in Carnaby Street. Manfred Mann, London kids in love with blues and long sideburns down to the chin, started me with a torrid harmonica, and guitarists like Jeff Beck made long, powerful solos over my chords. An obscure musician with a terrifying Hawaiian shirt called Benny Latimore stretched me like a breadstick by arranging me in a swing version and thus paid the installments for his new Cadillac Eldorado with leopard print seats (admired by all the pimps in the city). He made me like the decor of his Cadillac, horrible, but it worked. Then in 1970, finally, came the most memorable moment of my life: I ended up in the repertoire of one of the greatest American rock bands of all time: the Allman Brothers Band. And here I always get emotional.

Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy on me.

Lord have mercy, my heart's in misery
Crazy about my baby, yes, send her back to me

Lord, have mercy on me. Lord, have mercy, my heart is in misery. Crazy about my baby, yes, send her back to me. My last verse finally clearly tells the reason for the storm over the days of the week: a woman who has gone away, the absence that poisons life. I end with a prayer in a quasi-gospel style, a prayer for her return.

This is my strength: the simplicity of my words. The week of work and suffering to earn a few bucks, Saturday to waste them on games and not think, Sunday for hope, with a prayer for a woman's return. I sing the toil of today and the hope for tomorrow: I sing with few words the state of mind of millions of people. And I sing with the visceral power of the blues. This explains how I have been able to cross half a century of music.

Duane Allman was one of the greatest guitarists in rock history. With his brother Gregg, a singer with a pitch-black voice, he founded one of the most legendary bands in history. They came from Macon, deep in Texas. Along with Florida's Lynyrd Skynyrd, between 1969 and 1977 they made the history of "southern rock", the American rock of the southern states. A deadly mix: black music, lots of blues and rhythm'n'blues, stubborn boogie cadences, scents of country from Nashville, and Tex-Mex from Mexico. But southern rock mainly told a lifestyle. "Live free or die." Prairies and deserts crossed by motorcycle, bivouacs and jam sessions around the fire, great drinking sprees and LSD trips, fleeting loves in motel rooms, and devastating brawls in remote dance halls, all-out brawls. In short, the world of Dennis Hopper's film "Easy Rider", and then that unmistakable, infamous southern pride for roots and the flag.

On March 12, 1971, the Allman Brothers performed me at the Fillmore East in New York. I remember that evening as if it were yesterday, a grand triumphant red late winter sunset reflected by Manhattan's skyscrapers, the crowd in front and behind the Fillmore. The Allman Band showed up on motorcycles, the Allman brothers on Harley Davidson, bassist Oakley and the drummer on a 1967 Triumph. The military helmets, the colorful leather jackets with anarchist symbols. The audience parted to let them pass and applauded them. They crossed the wings of the crowd revving, like western bandits entering town on horseback. It was more than a rock concert, it seemed like the beginning of a Sergio Leone or Sam Peckinpah film. The Wild Bunch enters the town.

That night they performed me in a very slow, melancholic cadence version. Duane Allman made a guitar solo that has remained legendary for its simple intensity. Thus I ended up in what Rolling Stone magazine calls the greatest live album in history: "The Allman Brothers Band live at Fillmore East", released that year of 1971. Four months after that recording, Duane Allman died in a terrible motorcycle accident a few steps from his home in Macon, Texas. He crashed into a trunk with his Harley Davidson. What is really hard to believe, yet it actually happened, is that less than a year later, two blocks from Duane's accident, Barry Oakley, the band's bassist, met the same end, crashing into a bus with his Triumph.

You might say they were unlucky. Surely fate was not generous with the Allman Brothers. But the misfortune of their rival band, Florida's Lynyrd Skynyrd, who in 1977 crashed with their plane while going to a concert in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is no joke either. The singer and frontman Ronnie Van Zandt, the guitarist and his sister, the group's backup singer, and their manager also died on the spot, along with the crew members. All the other group members were seriously injured.

Someone over the years has spoken of a southern rock curse. But I don't believe that. I think those bereavements, and others that followed (I think of Steve Ray Vaughan's end), have to do with the lifestyle chosen by that generation. That "live free or die" which had even become the official motto of one of the American states came from the fusion of the cowboy roots of rural American provinces with the influence of the Beat Generation culture, especially the novel "On The Road" by Kerouac.

The result was an extremely naive concept of freedom, but authentic, at least in those years. Life conceived as an eternal adolescence on the road, long highways traveled by motorcycle, but also the naive aspiration to explore inner territories with heroin and LSD, existence as endless experience and constant overcoming of every limit, in which the word "tomorrow" is absent from the vocabulary. A lifestyle that still fascinates many today. Well, that lifestyle was extremely risky. And those artists were really risking because they weren't fake characters like many baby rockstars our contemporaneity has accustomed us to.

Dennis Hopper offered a cinematic account of what we are talking about in 1969 with the film "Easy Rider". The film does not have a happy ending, but a tragic epilogue that perfectly outlines the terms of the issue. Living free or dying often means dying.

There, I knew it. I rambled again. And I had promised not to. But when I think back to Duane Allman and the others and the lights of New York and the Fillmore that March evening in '71, it's easy for me to let go. Well, it has been a long time. Peace to your soul Duane Allman.

To conclude my memory album, I can say that even today, blues musicians are happy to perform me. I would just like to leave you with a piece of advice for the well-being of your ears and your soul. A free tip, I'm happy to do it.

One of the most important musicians who has performed me throughout his long career was certainly B.B. King, an extraordinary blues guitarist, one of the greatest of all time, among other things directly inspired by my father T. Bone Walker. Certainly not a virtuoso of the neck, a "slow hand" who rarely ventured beyond the pentatonic scale. Yet, despite his technical limitations, he was able to excite the audience in an extraordinary way. Enough to go down in history.

In 1993 King decided to record a version of me in a duet with another blues guitarist, the young Albert Collins. Two generations compared. Well, in the 1993 recording, the two musicians improvise together a truly beautiful solo. Sure, it's not exactly avant-garde music, indeed, to tell the truth, it's always me, still spry after fifty years of road. But B.B. King and Albert Collins manage to bring out an energy I thought was lost since the glorious times of the Allman Brothers. So refresh your ears with B.B. King and Albert Collins, trust me.

And remember, the eagle flies on friday. Make your calculations.