Do Not Go Gently Into That Bent Note

I had the kind of father who would learn the blues harmonica. No-one else I knew had a father, or any other kind of relative, who even remotely learned the blues harmonica. Legally, it is grounds for divorce if your spouse learns the blues harmonica in the confines of the marital home but, my mother didn’t avail herself of that recourse. For that, she must be admired for her powers of endurance.

The thing about ‘learning the blues harmonica’, and I’ve been through this myself, is that you must persevere until you are able to ‘bend a note’. This is essential and can take weeks if not months. You must ‘bend’ the note to make the bluesy, howling, Smokestack Lightning, train-done-leave-the-station, lonesome whippoorwill sound; without it, it aint nothing but a flat holler.

My mother would be ben the living room watching how the Sugden’s were getting on down on Emmerdale Farm while, through in his little box room at the end of the loaby, my Da would be giving it big licks trying to get that fucking note to bend. To her, it sounded like some kind of small rodent being penetrated anally by a dentist’s drill (although I’m pretty sure she never envisioned it in these terms). And, to the neighbours too, many of them elderly and confused by alcohol, it must have sounded like some novel form of domestic abuse that not even old wife-beating Scotland had heard about.

The agony, however, is not put at an end by the final, orgasmic ‘bending of the note’. The achievement of this makes you believe that you are the re-incarnation of the original Sonny Boy Williamson, and you just can’t stop bending the note.

Indeed, my mother, and the long-suffering and bewildered neighbours may have wished for the time before the bending of the note. At least then there was some hope he would give up…