Steve Cheseborough

Me on Oregon Art Beat
Originally published 1/24/2008

Well, it’s exciting to be featured on a TV program anytime but it’s totally thrilling when the program turns out so well:

http://www.opb.org/programs/artbeat/videos/view/67-Steve-Cheseborough
Check it out! My thanks and praise to Shawn Hutchinson and his crew for boiling down my life and work to a fine eight-minute piece.

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This is my summary of, and notes on, Talent Is Overrated, a fascinating book by Geoff Colvin.
Innate abilities pretty much don’t exist. Colvin gives the examples of Mozart and Tiger Woods, two people often thought of as blessed with superhuman abilities. Yet when you examine their lives you see that both had fathers who began training them at extremely early ages, in fields the fathers were expert in. By the time Mozart and Tiger emerged as serious contenders in their fields both had been working hard at it for a very long time (the pieces Mozart composed as a child are not considered great works, just curiosities).
Intelligence and memory also are overrated. Chess experts, for example, are often thought of as having been born with terrific memories. They can remember the arrangements of chess pieces very well, long after the game, and keep lots of such arrangements in their heads. However, when chess experts are shown random arrangements – that is, arrangements that could not happen in a real game, just chess pieces randomly placed on a board – they are no better than anyone else at remembering them. So they can remember the game situations because they study game situations, not because of any innate ability.
So what does make outstanding performers outstanding? It is not just experience, as we all know people who have done their jobs for many years and don’t get any better, in fact many people get worse at activities with time.
What makes the great performers great is deliberate practice. Note that word “deliberate.” Just hitting a bucket of golf balls is deliberate practice. And just doodling on the guitar, or playing songs you already know well, isn’t it either. The features of deliberate practice are:

• It must be designed specifically to improve performance
• It can be repeated a lot
• Feedback on results is continuously available
• It is highly demanding
• It isn’t much fun, or at least is “not inherently enjoyable.”

I don’t really agree with that last part. I think, however, that one has to redefine “fun” or “enjoyment” to enjoy practice. Just as a mountain climber has a different kind of fun from someone taking a stroll in the park – you have to really enjoy hard work and pushing yourself.
So what can we take from this book? In a way, it is liberating. We don’t have to wish we were born with any particular talents. If you want to be good at something, just start practicing it in a deliberate way. Do that every day, and eventually you will be good at it.
But on the other hand it is sobering: If we are middle-aged and want to start learning to play tennis, play guitar, or whatever, how can we compete with people who started decades before us and have been practicing hard all along? It probably isn’t going to happen. You probably won’t be one of the world’s best at anything you didn’t start a long time ago, and stay with. You just don’t have time.
But let’s say you are not trying to become the world’s best. You are just trying to improve. This book points at how to do it: deliberate practice done regularly.
Applying this to the way I study and teach blues guitar, I think we have our means of “feedback on results” in the old recordings we work with. If your rendition sounds closer to the record than it did yesterday, your practice is going in the right direction!
And when you come to class and get corrected by the teacher, you also are getting feedback. Try to “give yourself a lesson” when you practice at home. Don’t feel you’ve practiced just because you’ve made some sounds. Listen to yourself critically, correct yourself where you go wrong, and make yourself do it again, better. Hard work? Yes, that’s the point. Maybe do that kind of practice for 20 or 30 minutes, and then reward yourself with another 10 or 20 minutes of just doodling or playing songs you already know, if that is more fun.
Another great observation of the book is that great performers defy age. Oh, they decline at tests of speed, coordination, response time etc. as they get older, just like anyone else. But not within their domain of expertise. There, they retain their skills. Of course they have continued to practice as they get older!
So there you have it. Although he uses examples mostly from music and sports, Colvin relates a lot of these ideas to the business world – probably because there is more of a market in selling books to businesspeople than just to musicians and athletes. If you are interested in applying the “talent is overrated” concept to business, or just want to read more about it, go ahead and read the book. But if you just want to get better at playing music, then put down the book and pick up the guitar.

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Quando si va nel profundo Sud degli Stati Uniti a percorrere i luoghi del blues, non ci si può improvvisare “turisti per caso,” perchè il rischio di perdre pezzi di storia è molto alto. Bisogna allora affidarsi ad “un compagno di viaggio”, meticoloso e dettagliatissimo, come l’ottimo libro/guida “Blues Traveling/The Holy Sites of Delta Blues” dello studioso Steve Cheseborough, il quale non si è limitato alla sola attività di autore, indirizzando la sua passione anche come musicista. Dunque da carta e penna, alla chitarra/armonica/percussioni e voce, con i quali, da tre CD compreso questo (I primi due sono stati recensiti nel n. 87 e le due edizioni del libro nei numeri 80 e 89), Steve è come se volesse continuare l’approfondimento della materia riproponendo passi della tradizione afroamericana. Rispetto ai due precedenti CD, dove le versioni di Son House, Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, Tommy Johnson, Bo Carter ecc, mancavano di coinvolgimento emotivo per una esposizione scolastica e un canto dalle tonalità nasali e stridule, in questo suo terzo capitolo, dobbiamo riconoscere la volontà di Steve di aver tentato di dare più espressivitá al canto rendendolo più lento, cosicché anche il suo accento pulito risultasse un po’ più ricco di sfumature. Con la chitarra e l’armonica poi non va al di là del puro accompagnamento, ma no è un difetto, perché in alcuni casi ci mette anche del suo. Gli episodi che risultano menzionabili a nostro avviso sono “Hear Me Talking To You” (di Ma Rainey), “Who Broke The Latch” (di Bo Carter), il sobrio boogie dove si aiuta anche con l’armonica “Shake Your Hips” (di Slim Harpo), la delicata versione di “Vicksburg Blues” (di Little Brother Montgomery”, la ballata, di nuovo con l’armonica e accenno di canto yodel di “Little Ole Wine Drinker Me” (di Jennings/Mills), il traditional “Shortnin’ Bread” con l’uso dello slide e “Last Kind Words” (di Geechie Wiley). Siccome a noi Steve Cheseborough piace, ed è persona sincera e appassionata, vi invitiamo a contattarlo presso il suo sito www.stevecheseborough.com
Silvano Brambilla

When you go to the Deep South of the United States to cover the places of the blues, you can’t be an “accidental tourist,” because there is a great risk of losing pieces of history. You must entrust yourself to a meticulous and extremely detailed “travel companion,” like the optimal guidebook Blues Traveling: the Holy Sites of Delta Blues by the scholar Steve Cheseborough, who has not limited himself to the single activity of author, directing his passion also as a musician.
Therefore from paper and pen, to the harmonica, guitar, percussion and voice, with which, from three CDs including this one (the first two have been reviewed in issue 87 and the two editions of the book in issues 80 and 89), Steve seems to continue the deepening of reclaiming material from the passage of the African-American tradition. Compared with the two preceding CDs, where the versions of Son House, Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, Tommy Johnson, Bo Carter etc. lacked emotional involvement because of an academic presentation and a nasal and shrill vocal tone, in this his third chapter, we recognize Steve’s effort to give more expressiveness to the singing, rendering it slower, so that also his clean accent turned out a little richer in shadings. With the guitar and the harmonica then he does not go beyond pure accompaniment, but that is not a defect, because in some cases he also makes it his own. The tracks that turn out notable in our opinion are “Hear Me Talking To You” (by Ma Rainey), “Who Broke The Latch” (by Bo Carter), the straight-ahead boogie which is helped also by the harmonica “Shake Your Hips” (by Slim Harpo), the delicate version of “Vicksburg Blues” (by Little Brother Montgomery), the ballad, again with the harmonica and a hint of yodel “Little Ole Wine Drinker Me” (by Jennings/Mills), the traditional “Shortnin’ Bread” with the use of slide, and “Last Kind Words” (by Geechie Wiley).
Since we like Steve Cheseborough and he is a sincere and passionate person, we invite to you to contact him through his site, www.stevecheseborough.com
By Silvano Brambilla
Translated from the Italian by Steve Cheseborough

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That music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by the few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable – these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge. All other branches of knowledge stumble into it, it holds the key to their progress.
– Claude Levi-Strauss

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Oprah Winfrey’s Aunt Katherine is a huge fan of Blues Traveling, and carries it around with her in her car, I learned recently.

Katherine Carr Esters of Kosciusko, Miss., actually is Oprah’s cousin, although Oprah addresses her older relative as “Aunt Katherine.” Ted Ownby, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, recently was visiting with Esters and telling her about the center’s programs. The only ones she was already were familiar with, Ownby said, were a couple of radio shows — Highway 61 Blues and Thacker Mountain Radio — and my book, Blues Traveling: the Holy Sites of Delta Blues (which actually is unconnected to the center except that I am a graduate of the center’s Southern Studies program). Esters told Ownby she carries the book around in her car and refers to it as she drives around Mississippi.

I asked Ownby if Esters has the current edition and he said he wasn’t sure. So I signed a copy of it for her and gave it to him to give her.

I don’t know if Esters has shared the book with her cousin Oprah. But if Oprah wants me to take her on a tour of the blues sites of her home state I’d be delighted!

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Mother’s Best Music Festival — it’s named after another brand of flour that once sponsored a radio show in Helena, Ark. (King Biscuit Flour was the sponsor of King Biscuit Time, which lent its name to the town’s much bigger and longer-running festival, the King Biscuit Blues Festival, until an unfortunate legal challenge took that name away. That festival is now called the Arkanksas Blues and Heritage Festival.) Mother’s Best has been going for just five years, and I had the pleasure of playing at it last year and again this year. It happens in June. It’s free. It’s in the middle of this historic riverport. And it offered some great music! Legendary blues drummer Sam Carr (son of Robert Nighthawk) joined Dave Riley for a terrific set. (Sam is not in good health, so Bob “the Mississippi Spoonman” Rowell filled in for him on part of the set.) Jimbo Mathus of Squirrel Nut Zippers fame, now a Mississippi resident, played some torrid blues with his band. Donna Herula, an acoustic blues solo act from Chicago, made her major-festival debut in fine form.  C.W. Gatlin, a rockabilly great who lives in Helena, burned up the stage with an all-star band. And I did my best to stir up the ghosts of Robert Johnson, Skip James, Robert Lockwood Jr., Ma Rainey, Roosevelt Sykes, Memphis Minnie and all the other wonderful blues artists who worked in Helena in the early 20th century.  I also had the pleasure of appearing on Terry Buckalew’s “Delta Sounds” radio show the day before the festival, with longtime King Biscuit Time emcee “Sunshine” Sonny Payne co-hosting. Gatlin, Riley, Herula and I got to jam on air.

If a trip to the Delta is in your future, consider going next June to catch Mother’s Best!

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That sounds like a blues song but it’s just an observation, of a big surprise on my recent trip down there. Most of the fields that used to have cotton, just a few years ago, now grow corn or soybeans. Rice seems to be more common too. But cotton is way down. An old cotton farmer told me all the business has gone to China.

A farmer can decide each year what to grow, so maybe cotton will come back if international market conditions change. In the meantime, it makes it tough for me to talk about the Delta in my presentations! I’m used to saying, “Imagine what the Delta would have been like back before about 1940. There would have been hundreds of people — men, women and children — out picking instead of one man driving a tractor.” But maybe I have to modify it again and say “Imagine that there were white fields filled with cotton” and show a picture.

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The BB King Museum — a great new stop on the blues tour! I got to play and speak there recently, the weekend before the annual BB King Homecoming, when BB comes back to his hometow –  Indianola, Miss. — to play outdoors and in a club.  And I stopped back down in Indianola during the homecoming, to say hello to BB and to sign copies of my book, Blues Traveling. The museum gives you a copy as a membership bonus. So if you don’t yet have the third edition, consider joining the BB King Museum and receiving a copy.

It is probably the best blues museum there is. Don’t get me wrong — I love every blues museum, even the one-room ones that are shrines to individual musicians, such as the Howlin’ Wolf Museum in West Point, Miss., and the Mississippi John Hurt Museum in Avalon. And I love the bigger ones too. But this one had the bigges budget of any of them (I believe it was $25 million over 10 years of design and construction), and it was well spent. It includes movies, listening stations, rare photos, actual artifacts, a re-creation of his bus and one of his office, etc etc. It centers on BB King of course but as you tour it you learn about the area, many other musicians in many genres, U.S. history etc. And the museum hosts plenty of activities, like the lecture/performances by Steve Cheseborough, guitar lessons by local bluesman Jerry Fair, art exhibits, a farmer’s market, etc. Great place.

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This is from the funny-named but highly respected country-blues website weeniecampbell.com, written by the great guitarist and teacher John Miller:

“Blues Traveling–The Holy Sites of Delta Blues”–Steve Cheseborough, University Press of Mississippi

Author Steve Cheseborough must be very happy at the reception his Delta Blues guidebook, “Blues Traveling”, has received, for it is now in its updated and expanded third edition.  The book deserves the acclaim it has received, too, for it is hard to imagine how it could be improved upon in the way that it fulfills its primary function: to guide travellers interested in the Delta Blues to the major points of interest from Memphis in the north, to Helena, Arkansas in the west, to Natchez, in the south and to Meridian in the east, in a circular route of the blues country there that can be traversed in whole or in part in either a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction.  “Blues Traveling” goes much farther than simply reciting the names of places of interest and telling how to get to them, though.  It also provides guidance for negotiating the culture that travelers will encounter in the course of such a trip, what can be expected in the way of food and accomodations, and how to comport yourself while on the trip so that Mississipians will be glad to see you again should you ever decided to re-visit the area.

In some respects, “Blues Traveling” bears more than a passing resemblance to guidebooks to the areas of Classic Antiquity, Egypt, Greece, Turkey and Italy, in that a large number of the most interesting sites commemorate buildings that were once important landmarks, but which are no longer there.  So it is that travelers hoping to see where the Colossus of Rhodes or Library at Alexandria were may find an analogous experience seeing where Junior Kimbrough’s juke was, prior to its burning down.  The ephemeral nature of the physical relics of Blues musicians’ lives is not surprising, though, for the blues musicians came from an underclass population,  and didn’t leave much in the way of estates upon their passing; author Cheseborough makes this point, as well.

A high percentage of the places to be seen noted in the book are graves and museums.  Even very small towns often have a musem and “Blues Traveling” is really good about letting you know what you can expect to see at any one of the many museums discussed in the book.  The directions supplied in the book merit special praise, and should be particularly helpful in locating some of the graves mentioned in the book, which are often in very rural, out-of-the-way locations.  Author Cheseborough offers not only directions to the cemeteries, but also directions on foot once you get there.

“Blues Traveling” does a really fine job, as well, of noting the dates and locations of the various blues festivals in the area throughout the year (many of which are free to attend) and clubs and jukes that host live performances of blues.  Steve Chesborough is well qualified to speak to the types of blues one is likely to encounter in Mississippi today, for his tastes in blues embrace present-day electric blues as well as the acoustic masters of the past.  Historical context around the various locations and the musicians who frequent them (or frequented them in the past) is delivered in an easy-going informal fashion.

Some of my favorite portions of “Blues Traveling” relate more peripherally to the blues, and more explicitly to the culture in the larger sense, how to get along with people, and what are realistic expectations with regard to food and accomodations.  The book is protective of the year-long residents of the area and makes a special point of mentioning when a point of interest is currently private property.  To the extent that “Blues Traveling” both encourages tourism in the area by blues aficionados and works to avert cross-cultural mix-ups or tensions between the aficionados and the local populace, it is much to be commended.  That’s a fine line to walk.

“Blues Traveling” concludes with a list of recommended reading and another of recommended listening.  The listening list could use some updating:  the Gus Cannon reliease it cites has been out of print for many years, and there are currently other re-issues of Gus’s recordings that are easier to find.  Taken in sum, though, “Blues Traveling” does an admirable job at what it sets out to do, and is a fascinating read both for blues fans planning to make a trip to the Delta and to those who probably will never make the trip.  The best travel literature works equally well for travelers and homebodies, and by that standard, “Blues Traveling” succeeds in spades.

John M. Miller

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This past Friday night, I had finished my gig at a restaurant and was sitting at the bar having something to eat and drink. A goateed man, probably in his early 60s, was also sitting there and drinking good Scotch. He asked about the music and I told him sorry, but he had just missed it. He asked what instruments I played and I told him I sing and play guitar, harmonica and percussion.”I’m a one-man band,” I said.
“You’re just like Bob Dylan,” he replied.
I wanted to set him straight but without offending him if he was a Dylan fan. “Actually I’m a lot better than Bob Dylan,” I said. I told him that I admired Dylan’s guitar-playing and songwriting, but that he is a really poor harmonica player. “He just kind of blows in and out on it, the way a little kid does when you give him a harmonica.”
The man didn’t get offended at all, but became intrigued by the idea that there could even be such a thing as one harmonica player being better than another, or such a thing a skill applied to the harmonica. “What kind of range does a harmonica have?” he asked.
“Not bad for such a little instrument — three octaves,” I said. I pulled out a harmonica and showed it to him.
“Is that a small harmonica?” he asked.
I explained that there were various specialty harmonicas of different sizes, but that this 10-hole diatonic was your basic full-sized model, same as what every player uses.
“Can you play Beethoven’s Ninth on the harmonica?” he asked, skill skeptical that it was a real instrument.
Now…it just happens that he made the perfect request. I don’t know a lot of classical pieces — even to recognize and name them, let along to play them on the harmonica. And many classical pieces, even if I were familiar with them, would involve sharps and flats that would make them difficult to play on the diatonic harp, especially without having worked on them in advance. But Beethoven’s Ninth’s familiar “Song of Joy” theme is all “white keys,” very simple to play on the harmonica, you can even harmonize it in fact since it stays on the chords that are built in. I’ve played it before, just for my own amusement, and it is definitely the only classical piece I have ever played at all. So I said “Sure,” and picked up the harp and played a bit of it, astounding the man, the other barflies and the bartender. When they recovered, they started making requests for Schubert, Mozart etc, but I just smiled and put away the harp, saying, “You’ll have to pay for a full concert. That was just a little sample.”

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You can go to EaT: an Oyster Bar (N Williams at Failing Street, Portland) to hear me on Saturday nights. And of course for the oysters, absinthe, shrimp etouffee etc. But here’s another excellent reason to visit that fine restaurant: greens.

I love many things on the menu, but I want to make special note of the greens, which seem to have been ignored in all the press this place has garnered. (Probably that is because Northwest food critics don’t know much about greens.) If you like greens, or want to try them, this is the place. Several places in town just saute them with various meats and seasonings added. Well, greens are not spinach. They have to be slow- and long-cooked in plenty of liquid, or else they are tough. EaT chef Ethan does them right. The only problem is EaT does not serve cornbread, with which one typically soaks up the delicious broth, or “potlikker.” So make sure to ask for a spoon, and don’t let a drop of it go to waste!

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