Davis paints a verbal picture of smoke filled nightclubs, places where sweat and substance mingle with sounds the 9 to 5 person rarely hears nor understands when he/she does.
Each word has deep meaning to the writer. A meaning which a reader who's never smoked a joint, drunk whiskey from the bottle, had sex and pretended it to be love to a soundtrack of groundbreaking, boundary pushing music, will never understand.
Here's an extract (verbatim from a 1985 interview with Papa Jo Jones in a New York hospital):
I could indulge me/but you can hear me/playing behind Lady Day/I know nothing/'bout slavery/I was born free/and heard the blues/when they they asked me/was the Count colored?/all I could say was very.
You see I played music/with folks who could stand up/with nothing but the rhythm.
The words are Papa Joe's but the way Davis structures them is poetry in itself.
It's the music of black life put into the writer's distinctly personal prose. I'll read this more times than any of God's reps read the bible and then I'll be on the way to enlightenment ...
As compelling as the poetry is, the Foreword by Davis' poet sister artist comrade for over 50 years, Jessica Hagedorn, and the Introduction by Tobi Haslett are also riveting in their descriptions of the poet and her output.
I'll finish off this hopelessly inadequate review with a few further words from Davis:
a kid from Brownsville asked me
had I ever seen any violence
that’s why I clean my house
listening to songs from the past
times when no one asked anyone
if they’d seen a town burn
cause baby everybody had.
Lance
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