I was fourteen
When the sound leaped
From the speakers like flood water
And robbed my heart a beat.
I couldn’t fathom how he achieved such presence,
Shaking my bones while I listened
With the force of hurricanes
And carving landscapes across my mind.
His attire looked like it had been removed
From the grave of a western gunslinger,
But it accentuated his six-shooter approach
To reviving the blues tradition.
He traversed the fretboard
With the purest grace, and his sound
Permeates my veins to this day.
Though I rejoice that such a legend
Could walk the earth so close to my time,
I mourn that he strummed his last.
I imagine the state of music today
And picture how it would have been
Had the heavens not claimed one more.
Still, I take pride in the legacy
That preserved the raw power of his fleeting life.
Only thing I would say is to actually write out Stevie Ray Vaughan in the title. It somewhat distracted me at first reading while I was trying to figure out what was going on. Possibly that could be my lack of music knowledge or remembrance of what we talked about in class, but I feel that I would have liked it better with an immediate outright reference to Stevie Ray from the onset.
ReplyDeleteThis begins well, the simple straightforward declarative sentence, the striking image. A penchant for the multisyllabic tends to bog this down. Aim for gut rather than the intellect, the senses and not the brain. Describe him so we can see him rather than "attire than accentuates" which though nicely assonant conjures up no image. In the end the speaker is telling too much and showing not enough. How does his music touch you? Try to achieve something like that through language that has that raw power, that specificity (details of his guitar, his life, his death). Perhaps a line of lyric as epigraph? I heard a track on the Tulane radio yesterday, SRV and John Lee Hooker wherein JLH tells him before they begin, "when you get good is you got to keep working harder." Don't forget to add links to your posts (photo, video, etc)
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