Coldwell (Khyber) Daniel IV has earned an AAS in Graphic Arts Technology, a Masters in Liberal Studies, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Quaker Studies, and he plans on graduating with a Doctorate of Liberal Studies from the University of Memphis in the spring of 2025 along with his wife and fellow doctoral candidate Ann Walton Sieber.
Frederick Luis Aldama excellence in creative writing Award
Blues Suite
To accompany the photographic exhibition “Blues Plays the White Boy”
Coldwell (Khyber) Daniel IV, University of Memphis
As If Folk Blues Revival
Easter weekend 2023, Oxford MS Blues Archives
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 8
Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.
Why lovest thou that which thou receives not gladly,
Or else receives with pleasure thine annoy?
Where is the turning
For the notes that are moving
Force us into bruising
Our dialectical head?
Should we find it amusing
Blues is all round our bed?
Sufferers court their dead
(or dying) peoples just as gone
Noone needs to tells us in song
That the colors switch ahead
In the scene we dream the blues makes bread
In black and white here it’s read
everyone with whitebread
on the record it says has the say-so said
To entertain and burn the shame
That turned suffering into fame.
* * * * *
The Assassinators of the Blues
[“Ma” and “Pa” Rainey, primary classic blues originators, performed under this name. Memphis Minnie came along a few decades later.]
Chicago—
What a river—
The misty haze
of leaving
“Prove It on Me”
The South—
What a direction
Like go to hell
of blue
“Crazy Blues”
Redevelopment—
What a salvation
But the world is well
While evil
“Dead Letter”
Memphis—
A once and future assassinated place
The name of Minnie dead in Walls
good to be back home
“Bumble Bee”
* * * * *
Blues Cruise
[Memphis radio station WEVL hosts “‘The Best of Cap’n Pete’s Blues Cruise”]
WEVL boll weevil, we evils everywhere—
Look, mister, here’s my game, I tell you that I care
Staying on the radio station—
Call it that on a dare—
Sentiment and devotion get you on the air
Breaks the blues down into believable air
There I found the foundation
That gave the country its swing and its stare
Be evil believable we-sounds everywhere
Locked, loaded, the singers were tempered, meant it as a flair.
Line became a creation
Of the sliding strut of the player
Grit and grind and clay for your hair
Ground into the sound in your ear
Loose us of the plantation, the black, the white, the fair
Grist the pestilence with a soul so rare
We all hear our self dire, fallen here,
Love in a tribulation
The blue shot at us who hide in our lair—
Making us lay with our bodies along
The rhythm and spirit we feel when alone
Breaking the heart how I can’t scratch bone
The black cat bone dead, making the blues my home.
* * * * *
Far From Home Blues
Even though I’m by my babe
I’ve got nothing left to lose
Even though I’ve got my bae
It’s you I already lose
When she’s gone I’m all alone
With my friend the blues.
* * * * *
Chicago (Guitar Ho!)
I.
Struggle, Chicago, like butter on toast—
Live, poetry, live
Strum, guitar, I can’t love without the simplest things—
Blues, baby, blues
A child stems from the burgeoning host—
Wail, scream, wail
I fight and submit to these imperious things—
Speak, chaos, speak
Lonely white boy asks you for a welcome mother—
Wail, baby, wail
Don’t know you, don’t know either what to do—
Death, lover, death
Reaching out to all who use—
Drug, stupor, drug
I can’t leave and I can’t complain—
Loss, honey, loss
I feel how, now your love me knows—
Muse, baby, muse
You must be the one I found—
Lost, stranger, lost
One more breath and I’ll be without—
Hell, lover, hell
Love always has an end when I start to speak—
Speak, silence, speak
II.
Edge of light against my heart—
Silence bright promulgate my art—
You look like Evanston
But sound like Chi-town
You breathe like cinnamon
And are just as brown
You smite me with fire
Like a liar hangs around
You sit like water
And make me sound.
You come from a tar pit
Where I put you down
You bought that tar pit
A reservation I put you down
For a table for pretty women
To turn upside my frown.
* * * * *
The blues have put me in Araby
“Right on!” the front porch of the Grammy Museum
In Cleveland Mississippi,
Not far from where I was born
My granny wasn’t much into it, nor my granddad of the orient;
Grandma and grandma were Eastern Stars
They did not sit on the porch and write like I can now
My mother taught me: sit on the front porch…
I have no tea of consciousness to drink, no drum of woman to pound
I do not drum the tables’ tops of the Grammy museum
As profound as they are, I instead write poetry in the anticipation of the blues
A safety against depression, a celebration of feeling over matter
There is no name awaiting me on the grammies
The musician I am with has the vehicle, and he gets lost
Some of us are in this predicament of company keeping,
a sole of the shoe hitting the pavement to work
when the people of this state asked for the soul hitting their hearts to dance
My friend is off beating a game. I am here beat myself, so I belong, dead to the world and so
Meet the back home ghosts and we cry “ in joy meant freedom.” We say
Pure imagination – Delta State
Is surely where I’m at and I hope to be discovered here to transit
To Memphis; it’s along walk back home in the blue dawn fading from
glare of sympathy’s symphonic vibration
I play to none but amble lost:
a midnight rider on a paper horse
Chorus:
Hearts of Palm rest in my hands
The love of the sound of
The enslaved land
Broken trees and concrete trail
All fail all fail to hail
The broken crosses
Bosses Winter flaws are here and gone
Alligators stay out of town
To thaw bruised-blue bodies
Write like a beast and find your mind—the lightness of the dark
Posing and procrastination
the will says; you must write for your forbearer’s legacy; it is now your own
Eat! Catfish, artist, be the crust of sorrow consumed by hate
They call getting you to work
Die lovingly, lonely, in the grease of your soul, overly done,
Food for the fishes in your turn.
Mashup:
Gather unto me, boom boom
Out, brief god, down by the riverside;
Swing low, beedle um bum, I’ll tan your hide.
* * * * *
The music called the Delta blues was probably born in Mississippi in the late 1890s. I was born Coldwell Daniel IV in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in 1962. I go by Khyber. The blues have dogged me my entire life, mostly as a music whose light pierced the shadow in me, as I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. At first, I embraced the blues I heard as an intimate stranger who comforted me in the dark; then I resisted the power of the blues to move me to places I didn’t want to go. Now I feel like dancing to the blues—I surrendered to the music that found its way in me when I was at St. John’s College, the “great books” school, in the 80s. I came back to Memphis and worked healing the blues as a mental heath worker in the 90s.
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