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Fred Davis was a legend, but only in my living room. There was always music around myhouse, but as a teenager, I started digging deeper and deeper in to the blues records in myDad's collection. That was when I started to get the Fred Davis story in fits and starts. Fredcould play like T-Bone Walker and sang in a high, keen voice like J.B. Lenoir, he said. He usedto front a jump band in Kansas City, before something went down that sent him to prison atLeavenworth. In the summer of 1967, he ended up working alongside my Dad at Harco, theCleveland factory where my grandfather was an executive. They became friends, bonding overthe B.B. King and Bobby Bland records blaring from the AM radio on the factory floor.Fred taught my Dad the rudiments of blues guitar, but his style. Instead of barring with his firstfinger, he wrapped his thumb around the back of the neck. That left his other fingers free tocreate big, ringing voicings that imitated the Kansas City horn sections he heard in his youth.Fred could play up and down the neck and, even when he played and sang just by himself, hesounded like a full band. Or, at least, so the legend went. These were only foggy memories fromthirty years previous, passed down from a father to a son.But then we found the tape. A quarter inch reel in a plain white cardboard box, hiding on a shelfin the attic. My Dad explained how it came to exist He found some friends (acquaintancesreally) who had a band and some equipment. They setup in my grandparents living room wherethe upright piano was, and he invited Fred over to record some of his songs with the bandbacking him up. Invited him over, to play loud music, in his boss's living room. Sounds likesomething I would have done. The idea was that maybe if there were some recordings of Fredthat he could use them to get booked on the nascent college blues-revival circuit, but it wasn't tobe.We fou
