New Orleans Blues
2004-04-11 - 5:09 p.m.

Elmore Potter knew what it was like to sing the blues. He’d played the same Gibson Hummingbird on the same godforsaken corner in the same section of New Orleans for fifteen years.

He’d had a lover once, not a wife, because to have a family would be crazy when you made your living singing on a street corner. She hadn’t been a one-night stand either. She’d been a lover in the truest sense, one that he had affections for, and one who returned them. She’d died of pneumonia two years after they made love for the first time. Elmore mourned her death by composing another song, and, after he had sung his sorrow away, he slowly moved on with his life.

Elmore would stand on the corner and watch the people pass to the rhythm of his twelve-bar blues. Sometimes, he would work what he saw into his music; mostly, he stuck with what he knew.

On nights when it would rain, Elmore would gather up his pittance and pay for board in the basest of boardinghouses. On nights when it was warm and clear, he would sleep underneath the stars in the New Orleans City Park, surrounded by other men and women who had even more blues that would never be sung.

One day, Elmore played his last note. He laid his guitar softly on the pavement, and crumpled poetically to the ground. The crowd stopped, the ambulance came, and the world moved one, one less bluesman making little difference.

The guitar was picked up by an old man named Earl, and was burned that night, it being a chilly night in October.

Time passed, and he was forgotten, as so many others have been and will be. He left behind only a song. The street does not hear its music. The people do not hear its words. The streets sing the never-ending blues, and on that day, another verse was written.