Category Archives: blue funks

RIP Davy Lockhart

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heritageJack’s guest blog about a dear friend

Davy first came into my life in the mid 1970s when he was in his early 50s and I was in my 30s. I was at a party in his house when I discovered that he had been a fiddle player as a youngster, but hadn’t kept it up. But he got out his violin and we found we could play a few tunes together.

The very first time I persuaded him to get up and play at the local folk club not long after that first party, he prepared to play the first note and promptly fainted. Half an hour later he got back up played like nothing had happened. A few years later he joined a group of us to create ‘Heritage’.

His favourite place, after Fife, was France. He famously spent 6 months there after Heritage broke up and wound up as guest fiddle player with the Occitan group ‘Los Cotillons de Tonniens’ touring all over the country with them (in costume) playing all the tunes he’d fallen in love with when Heritage had toured there many times.

Heritage spent 15 years playing traditional Celtic music at folk clubs, festivals, concert tours, radio and TV all over Scotland and Europe; Davy was an integral part of the front line for much of that time. By profession he was an internationally recognised artist with work hanging in prestigious collections all over the world, as well as a much loved art teacher in a Fife High School who certainly influenced his pupils very much for the better. But he often said that his musical career saved his sanity from the bureaucracy and politics of the Scottish education system.DSCN2126

During our travels with Heritage the stories about him abounded – from his terrible driving to his ability to fall asleep at the dinner table. He would be the first to admit that he wasn’t a great fiddle player – and yet – he helped establish the sound of the group and that didn’t change much despite various personnel shuffles over the years. The other great stories were the ones that he told – like the time he joined the Home Guard so he could have a rifle to shoot the capitalists when the war was over, and on, and on – –

Davy died peacefully in his sleep on December 28th 2014 at the age of 92 after some health issues over the last year or so.

I consider myself lucky to have known him and to have had him as a friend.

 

The Monday Book: RANDOM FAMILY by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

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This is not a happy family book, so you may want to wait until Spring to read it. I ordered it after following its appearance on my friend Nichole’s TEN BOOKS THAT INFLUENCED ME list. We shared a love for eight of the ten, one was A Prayer for Owen Meany (and Nichole is the reason our staff cat has that name; it’s the only Owen that will ever grace our shelves) and one was Random Family. I love ethnographic studies, so I ordered it.

Densely packed, this is the summation of 11 years of work with people floating through – or perhaps drowning in – the justice system. I’m not sure the term “social justice” appears often, but the whole book is an indictment of the idea that poverty is the fault of the poor. And it’s a really ringing indictment. Roaches falling by the dozens into carefully chosen food, men coming up fire escapes into the windows of “free” housing provided a woman with four daughters, the inner workings of a prison hierarchy for education and a future–it’s going to set you back a bit.

Jack liked the book because, as a prison visitor, he’s seen much of what the men go through trying to form outside attachments and secure stability. LeBlanc didn’t use the words “search for security, love, maybe some significance” very often, either, but the whole book is one mad shuffle between family members looking for those things, mostly in that order.

Coco and Jessica, the main female characters, are clearly drawn as real, lovely, flawed, and stuck. One of the questions in the book group guide at the end of this book reminds readers that LeBlanc was in the community for eleven years, part and parcel to all that is described, yet she doesn’t appear as a character.

That’s one of the book’s quirks; LeBlanc has made nothing up, it’s all from interviews and observation. Yet she is invisible, and the book is not so much narrated by an invisible person as scatter pelleted by some unseen weapon. Sentence after sentence, some of them barely hooked together, scene after scene, description after description, and although the whole thing circles a spiral of recurring events, it doesn’t sound the same. LeBlanc writes like a machine gun.

Not everyone will like this book. It’s less narrative arc or journalism than ethnographic description. It doesn’t ask “why,” just tells “how.” I’d like to say it’s haunting, but in all honesty, as someone so far removed from what LeBlanc describes, the word might be daunting. How can anyone make economic inequality going this far wrong, better?

LeBlanc did an interview ten years after the book’s 2003 publication; you can find it here.