A few months ago, blues guitarist Lurrie Bell lost his wife Susan Greenberg to cancer. If it hadn't been for her well-known intervention in his seemingly calamitous life, we all might've lost Bell a lot earlier.
He acknowledges this with a short and quiet statement of fact. "She helped turn everything around, that's the truth," he says. "But she's gone now. So I got to go on without her. Her sister and daughter are here and that’s helping and I'm working real hard, you know."
Just a little over a decade ago, Greenberg helped Bell out of the jumble of alcohol, depression and anxiety that his life had become.
They got married, had two kids and then heartbreakingly lost both to illness shortly after their 2003 birth. The then had another daughter, only for Greenberg’s life to be cut short by lymphoma. It was a huge, life-shattering-and-reaffirming change for the 49-year-old Bell to gain so much and lose so much in such a short time.
That's particularly true for a man who, like so many in modern society, had become plagued by the pressures of life. Before meeting Greenberg, he was reliant on a drink to preserve the sense of social disconnection that protected him from life's stresses. He
went through lengthy bouts of not working at all and of homelessness, although even during those dark times
he still ventured into the odd club to unleash his abilities.
Now, with his wife gone, he has pored himself into his art and craft, reliant more than ever on the release he gets when a lick is running perfectly and it seems the world has faded away.
"It's easier to get that when you're playing at home alone," he notes. "Sometimes, I can just play the same song, over and over and just get pulled right into it and you get that connection. "It's harder in the club or at a show, you know? You have to concentrate more on everything that's going on, so it's harder to get to that comfort level.
But that's why you've got to have your chops down, so you can concentrate through all that until you get it right."
Bell has been getting it right now since playing in his fatherCarey's band during the late 70's, into a short period with Billy Branch and Freddie Dixon in the Sons of the Blues, then onto a solo career that was aborted by his inability to keep it together. The one consistent fact was that every lover of classic Chicago blues round him was in awe of his soulful chops.
Although he learned to play as much through osmosis as anything -- his father's house was full of the greatest
players in Chicago history on any given night -- he studied his phrasing and delivery from a St. Louis great, Albert King. Then he added in his own flourishes and small rhyhtmic fills, creating a style that has the original urgency of the earliest electric gutiar attacks but adding some urbane cool.
Even with his prodigious talent, performing is still difficult for him, due to the anxiety of it. Although he gets through it by reminding himself that every chance he gets to play blues guitar makes him happier, he is acutely aware that every gig is a responsibility. He reminds himself that he owes it to his family and to Susan , and that helps. "That's why I've got go out and do a good job. And I like to remind myself of how good it feels when I get to play. I've been doing real well lately in terms of having opportunities, and it feels good to be able to think about that for awhile."
And so far, it's going well. Over the next few months he'll tour Japan and hit a string of festival and club appearances. He has a couple of regular weekly gigs in Chicago and adds in recording work both with his own material and alongside Pierre Lacoque's Chicago showband, Mississippi Heat. "People are always talking about how there ain't any work out there but if you want it bad enough,
