review

Jon Coleman's southern white blues were the night's high point

Of course white guys get the blues

review and photos by Eric Jackson

Mother, prison, farms, trucks and trains are the eternal themes of country music, with a certain overlap into the blues.

Black female blues go heavy into bad neighborhoods, bad race relations, addictions and bad relationships with usually addicted men who beat or otherwise mistreat the women in their lives.

When black men sing their authentic blues, they get into all of these things and more, with tinges of violence --- now can you answer the question on the black IQ test: "Who shot Billy Liam?" and for extra credit tell us why? --- and there are also tendencies toward strong social, economic and political commentaries.

Now the Brits are a class conscious society, and the practitioners of the blues coming from the US trace their musical lineage more closely to the African-American standards. It's not a matter of race per se.

But southern US society is a place where the main social fault line breaks down according to race, and the blues that southern white guys sing are different. Yes, there are all sorts of exceptions, but even if Jesse James was a palefaced outlaw from Missouri, it's black guys, not white guys, who sing about being bad like Jesse James. Prison is a theme in country music and black renditions of the blues, but rarely heard when southern white men play the blues. Losing a house or a car, that's within the existential canon, and losing a lover by choice or otherwise is what it's usually all about --- southern white men's blues are about the tragedies of the lower middle class.

These blues can take on many forms, and be rendered with musicianship good or bad. On December 1 Panama Blues put on a concert on the patio of the Summit Golf & Resort clubhouse and that association has good tastes in music, so headliner John Mooney, opening act Shorty & Slim (not really the blues, but very popular) and the second act, pianist/singer/composer Jon Coleman backed by a pickup band of Panamanian musicians, did put on impressive displays of musicianship.

Mooney mostly played solo, acompanying himself on guitar, until later in the night he invited several of the shows other musicians to accompany him. It was all good enough, but just a bit disappointing to the crowd that wanted more jumping dance music and to some of the people who couldn't comprehend lyrics in Mooney's accented delivery. (This reviewer didn't have that problem.)

We heard the southern white man's blues, and Shorty & Slim's take on an existence we know a lot better, that afternoon and evening. It was a worthwhile show, whose best moments were when Jon Coleman was onstage.

John Mooney? He was better than some of the audience appreciated

Are the banes of your existence jungle-bred roaches taking over your kitchen, the

grasping pretensions of raspado men turned Panamanian politicians of Pedro's stripe,

or the colonial society in which you were raised having been abolished? Alex Reyes,

a/k/a "Slim" of Shorty & Slim, will well express your blues via other musical genres

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