Eulogy for David Lightbourne

Oh my god. My good old pal David Lightbourne RIP. I just heard from Joe Carducci that he died night before last, apparently in his sleep. A good old friend. I learned a mighty lot from him as a young 'un and have admired him for many years. He was very good to a young Crispo in the days in Portland. I put many a mile on his couch, up by The Earth Tavern, and many a mile on his lp's, too. Crushed.

So many -- too many -- good old buddies gone.

David was 67, one of the very last true afficianados and fingerpickin' masters of oldtimey music. Proto-rock and roll, he called it. Rock and roll's earliest roots. I loved to hear him play. I learned an awful lot from him about oldtimey music, jug band, and delta blues and the many greats who played it. A masterly musicologist of American music, with an encyclopedic memory, he had an amazing record collection I was privileged as a young man to have nearly all to myself. I was brokedown poor. Dave gave me a shoebox of crappy cassettes I used to make a bunch of compilations from his hundreds of records. I still have some of those tapes, thirty and more years later, and still listen to them, too. I learned songs that have stayed with me that way, like "Jim Cannan's," a Robert Wilkins song about a long-ago bar in Memphis in the 20s, about which a Memphis preacher has been quoted as saying, "If whiskey ran ankle deep in the streets and every man were given a cup, no one would get drunker, faster, than they did at Jim Cannan's." That was also how I was introduced to Robert Wilkins' music in general, still a staple of my domestic airplay.

When I met Dave, he was playing in the Metropolitan Jug Band in Portland, with Fritz Richmond, also gone, now, along with their incredible knowledge, memories, and lore. Hipsters of legend. I'd arrived in town with Michael Hurley and The Sensitivos (Michael, Dave Reisch and me, and often other friends, especially Lonesome Wayne Thomas and Robin Remaily. Billy Foodstamp, another Portland hipster of legend gone, now, too, also was known to play washboard with us in that period.) We'd been moving on together for a long while from Vermont to Boston to New York to Nevada to California and up to Portland. The first night we were in town, we went out to hear the Metropolitan Jug Band, I don't remember where, and they were sounding good, too. But what I remember most was a grin Dave got on his face while up on the stage, playing, when he saw the bunch of us walk in. We played some that night, for free beer. Really bad beer, as I recall. Some Portland-brewed swill you're better off not knowing about.

And of course we encountered each other often after that, because David was another Rounder in all but name, besides being a master in his own right. But our friendship was made fast a bit later on when David was kind enough to let me move into his apartment of the time, up near the old Earth Tavern, where I camped on his couch for quite a while, after Steve Weber, whose spare bedroom I'd been occupying, gave me the boot into the street, likely for good reason, because I haven't always been the charming motherfucker I am today. What's a little homelessness amongst friends? Steve and Essie were very kind to have put up with young Crispo at all, in the first place, and I'm still thankful to them, both. It's not often a young 'un gets to live with legends he's admired from afar, and I remember all of the many kindnesses still, with great affection.

Now, let me put this straight: David could talk. I mean to say, he could talk on into any night, and did, for as long as you could take it. Michael called him The Informaton. Michael told me, "If he ever asks you do you know about Blindboy Pigfoot or whoever, the correct answer is yes. If you say no, you will get the whole biography, and you will find out more about Blindboy Pigfoot than you ever cared to know." But I'll put this straight, too: As Weber said yesterday, lots of people talk a lot, but David always had something real to say.

And say he did. I learned a whole lot of stuff about real American music, bedrock roots musics, and how it's supposed to be played from David and Michael, and Weber, too. David and Michael, especially, were both very free with the lore lessons, with me, along with their huge record collections.

Ain't ever been anyone freer with the lore and lessons about how American music's supposed to be played, however, than was David Lightbourne. I was already, when we met, and had been for some years, playing oldtime blues and jug band and country songs as if they were rock and roll, which is how I got into this long adventure with the last untamed Americans to begin with -- this "karass," David called it, borrowing the word from Kurt Vonnegut. Songs like "Rich Girl," "Bring It With You When You Come," "Mind Your Own Business," "Jesus On The Mainline," "My Bucket's Got A Hole In It," and others still present in my standard rep. But I was still a young man, then, and self-taught, and hadn't had the depth and breadth of listening or listening time, yet, that cats like David, Michael, and Weber'd had in addition to their own many talents. They had ten or twelve years on me and were intimate with many hundreds -- thousands, actually -- of songs and records from those rich veins of American music from the 20s through 50s. (To which they've all added, themselves, over the decades since the early 60s.)

I'm so glad I got to go out to Laramie in '06 to play an annual festival, The Uplands Breakdown, he and Joe Carducci have co-organized for ten years. I got to play with Dave again and stay at his place again, and smoke the hootie while listening to his incredible stories that went on and on into the night and started back up next morning, right where he'd left off or on some other tack still to be discussed and elucidated in scholastic detail. Elwood was there, too, an annual event for him. And then I got to play a gig with Elwood and Amy Annelle in Denver afterward.

Damn it, I've owed David a phone call for a while and I'm so sorry now I procrastinated on it for so long. He didn't have regular access to a computer and almost all of my communications get done by email. Last I heard from him, a few months ago, was a long voicemail message, telling me, "dammit, Gary, if you want to communicate you're gonna have to learn to use a telephone and I was just telling Carducci ...." You had to be ready to keep a phone to your ear for a good two hours or more when you called Dave. I wish I'd been ready. I loved the old curmudgeonly iconoclast and have admired him now more'n 30 years. I don't expect I'll stop now because he's gone. He had a part in making me the man I've become and he was a good old buddy I'm going to miss. An American original. A true believer.

The last deep lesson I came away with from David, out there in Laramie in '06, he was telling me all about the guy he was working for, who'd let him build an apartment upstairs over the business. He was telling me how his boss was an evangelist christian. I allowed as how I couldn't imagine having the same in my own life. Dave said, "Well, Sisco, you see the thing is, America's a big country with lots of different kinds of people in it, and if you want to write about it and sing about it, you have to be able to deal with that. All of it."

Yes, you do.

RIP, old buddy.