CeDell Davis to play blues at Robinson Theater show

CeDell Davis has been playing the blues for most of his 90 years, even though his mama told him he'd suffer eternal damnation for it.

He has performed and recorded with Robert Nighthawk, R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, Sonny Boy Williamson, Col. Bruce Hampton and many others. On Friday night, he will hit the stage for a show at Central Arkansas Library System's Ron Robinson Theater in Little Rock as part of the Arkansas Sounds Music Series.

He has a new album -- Even the Devil Gets the Blues -- on the Sunyata label, which is owned by Barrett Martin, the Seattle drummer who was a member of grunge-era heavyweights Screaming Trees and Mad Season. And then there's a documentary with the same title as the album, which should start hitting film festivals early next year.

It's a fruitful time for the Helena-born Davis, who has seen his fair share of the blues, musical and otherwise. A bout with polio when he was just 10 left his hands unable to make chords on his guitar, but he taught himself to play using a butter knife as a slide.

And if that wasn't hard enough, he also had to keep his playing a secret.

"Not getting caught by my mother," is what he says was the most difficult part of learning the guitar after polio. "She didn't like no blues around the house. She said I would die and go to hell, so I would go play by the woodpile or in the outhouse." (Davis answered questions via email through his friend and fellow musician Greg Binns.)

He would go on to perform often on the influential King Biscuit Time radio program with Williamson, fellow Helena native Nighthawk and others.

"He was a natural born thief," Davis says of Williamson, who copped his stage name from a popular Chicago-based harmonica player of the same period. "He would always want me to go off and play shows with him, but he had 'sticky hands.' He would run off with the show money when you fell asleep."

He has fonder memories of slide guitarist Nighthawk: "I looked up to him. He had recorded records. I wanted to do that, too. We would travel a lot. [I] ended up in St. Louis with him ... He wanted all the ladies to himself, though."

In 1957, while playing with Nighthawk's band at a gig in St. Louis, a shot was fired and Davis was nearly trampled to death in the stampede that followed. His legs were so severely broken that he has spent most of the time since bound to a wheelchair.

By the early '60s, he was in Pine Bluff, where he played and gigged around. In 1994, he recorded Feel Like Doin' Something Wrong, produced by fellow Arkansan Robert Palmer, followed by 1998's The Horror of It All for the Mississippi-based Fat Possum label. When Lightning Struck the Pine Tree, recorded with Martin, Buck and others, was released in 2002 on Martin's Sunyata imprint.

A stroke in 2005 left Davis unable to play guitar and he was living in a Pine Bluff nursing home when he was tracked down by Binns, who was a fan.

"He was in bad shape," Binns says. "He could barely talk."

As he had in the past, though, Davis recuperated and it wasn't long before he was appearing in concert again, now with Binns and his son, guitarist Zakk. (Along with them, Davis will be accompanied Friday by Johnny Stephens on harmonica, Tim Green on bass and Trey Lambreth on drums.)

"Mr. Davis has taught me so much about the blues, but even more about how to live life," Greg Binns says. "I love the fact that he never sits around complaining about his health, and he has plenty to complain about. He is always planning on what to do next."

The new album, the follow-up to 2015's Last Man Standing, includes traditional blues songs like "Kansas City" and "Dust My Broom" along with CeDell originals like "She's Got the Devil in Her." Davis' growling vocals are paired with R.E.M.'s Scott McCaughey on one track and he is joined by Seattle singer Annie Janzter on others. Mike McCready of Pearl Jam plays on the album as well.

"I think all of the musicians that I brought in to play on this record and the previous albums, all of us were affected by CeDell," Martin says from Seattle. "He has this almost Buddha-like quality to him. Maybe because he's had so many hardships, he just gracefully rolls through the world."

Weekend on 11/03/2016