BLUES BYTHER BOOKBLUESMAN SMITH ON VIOLENCE, LIFE AND MUSIC

"My personal feeling for music is like it's a honeybee. You see a swarm of bees flying over, you can take a bucket and start beating it loud enough to where the bees can hear it, they will come to the sound no matter how high they flyin'. They will come to the music. There isn't but one kind of music, the music inclined." And the "music inclined" theory is all, of course, down to the individual, something that Smith rationalizes into a somewhat metaphysical version of Plato-meets-Will Rogers ideology. "I never heard a band that was no good, but I saw people that was no good for what they was tryin' to do," he reasons. "They should relate to something else--not try to be a pattern that they couldn't handle--be a butcher or something. But the music itself is never rotten." Smith himself is on a continuing trek of discovery with his instrument, even after nearly four decades of playing. "I'm never happy. . . . I see other musicians can play so much further out into the execution than I can do, into the execution that I'm looking for that I haven't read yet," he admits. "But what I do is different. I do mine with a feelin', with a killin'. I'm trying to stand on the moon but reach for the sun. That's the only way I can explain it.