David Vest Profile

Piano Pounder David Vest

Baptized in the Blues

David Vest

When considering feature articles for the BluesNotes, the actual artist selection is an integral part of my thought process: Who has been featured previously? Who has not, and deserves to be? On a recent afternoon workday while listening to KBOO's Blue Monday, hosted by Bill Rhoades, I recognized the soft drawl of the program guest: David Vest - a deserving candidate! I have had the pleasure of seeing David perform over the course of the past few years and have been impressed by his talents. Little did I know the depth of the man behind that keyboard magic.

By happenstance, this month's selection was a gold strike. With a shorter timeframe than typically allotted for the process, I started my research — always feeling dutiful to take the time and effort to properly credit the musician. I found instant relief after a few clicks of the mouse on David's Web site, where I unearthed a wealth of information. It appears that Mr. Vest has already been approached with the idea of putting his story into print. I discovered CounterPunch, a political newsletter, which contains installments from "David Vest's memoir, Rebel Angel, the chronicle of how an Alabama boy became a poet, a rocker, and a political radical, with stops in Romania, academia and the inner sanctums of Big Oil along the way."

There were six chapters of some amazing stories, and I discovered that I would be featuring not only a musician, but also a writer. With tales of being a draft dodger at the age of 11, composing a novel, writing poetry, attending a speech by Robert Kennedy, performing with Roy Orbison, receiving criticism from Joan Baez, meeting John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, Johnny Cash, and much more.

Prior to one of his performances with the Paul deLay Band, I met with David in person. He officially joined the band in January, but has long enjoyed the wonderful chemistry that comes from performing with Paul.

David previously was a member of the Cannonballs, honored with a Muddy Award for "Best New Act" by the CBA in 2002. Seven of the cuts from the Cannonballs CD were written by Vest. You can count on hearing some political statements in David's songwriting. He has since signed with Trillium Records, based in Government Camp, feeling the need to perform even more of his own material. David acknowledges that Trillium has been very supportive of him. His solo CD, entitled "Way Down Here," was recorded with the Willing Victims: Alan Hager on guitar; Jeff Minnick on drums; Dave Kahl on bass. It also features Dover Weinberg, the Leon Despair Singers, and another local favorite, Paul deLay. The performers were unaware they were being recorded that night, creating a real "live" feel. The music went straight into the board and onto a CD.

Vest's music has its roots in Gospel, but as Vest says, "I like to play the two-fisted Gulf Coast Barrelhouse Boogie style I learned by direct laying on of hands from piano players like Big Walter The Thunderbird, Katie Webster and Floyd Dixon." As the spirit moves him, David is up off his seat and onto his feet while playing.

"Tonight I'll be singing, 'Lawd lawd lawdy Miss Clawdy, you just don't treat me right, you like to ball till the morning then you stay gone late at night.' I have sung that song in six different decades now. I have sung it from Birmingham to Bucharest. I have sung it when I should have been home. But it's the nights I didn't sing it, the nights I did stay home, that I regret."

David Vest and Floyd Dixon
playing together in 1999.

Prior to the Cannonballs and while residing in Texas, David toured throughout the state with Floyd Dixon and Jimmy "T99" Nelson, who David describes as being "almost a father to me." They met while Vest lived in Texas and made some recordings together that have yet to be released. David spent 20 years in Texas "until I realized I could leave." Along with Texas, David was also escaping a severe case of the Blues. He temporarily removed himself to a beautifully remote Oregon scene. Vest decided this was the place for him and is now proud to proclaim Portland as his home to visiting performers.

In Vest's writings, he attempts to answer the question: "How did a white southern male, descended from Confederates and slave owners, baptized at thirteen by total immersion, end up a radical?" David reveals that he has come from a long line of rebel angels. "My own rebellion began at the piano and spilled over into my life, far too slowly for my own good. I was a secret sympathizer far too long, a secret agent for nothing in particular. My heart was in the right place, but I couldn't always find it. My first composition, a rock instrumental, was called 'Blackout.' My next song was called 'Rebellion.' What does that tell you?" David saw music not as a profession, but as a calling.

    "I make a living doing nothing I don't love to do, namely making music and writing words. I do not remember not wanting to do them. As far as I can tell, I could always play the piano and I could always write. I decided some time ago that this is how I would live, by my gifts, doing what I felt I was meant to do. I resolved to get up every day and work whether I had any paid work to do or not. I vowed to support myself at whatever level my music and my writing would bring in, and to give it away when I couldn't sell it. I haven't had a boring day since. That's my advice: quit that job. Jump! I'm sorry I ever did anything else, to tell the truth, although it wouldn't leave me with much of a story to tell if I hadn't.

    In early 1958, when I was still 14, I had gone to the old National Guard Armory in Huntsville for a Carl Perkins/Roy Orbison/Johnny Cash show. Orbison didn't make it; his wife was having a baby that night. Cash was cool enough, with the Tennessee Three. But Carl Perkins was a life-changing experience. From the instant he hit the first note of "Matchbox," my life was on a new course. I had never heard anything like it. I still haven't. I am still waiting for a rock and roll show that rocks harder than Carl Perkins did that night.

    In those early days of rock and roll, a band could just pull up to a TV or radio station and offer to perform. The stations were glad to see them coming, most of the time. If you had a record, the DJ would cue it up while you told him about it and then give it a spin. If two or three people called the station and said they liked it, it got played again and again."

A professional musician from the age of 15, Vest grew up six blocks from Tuxedo Junction and was inspired by the music emanating from nearby buildings. It was his maternal grandmother, Ora Bell Ryland, who gave him his first piano, paid for with 50 of her own hard-earned dollars. The old H. P. Nelson upright was so heavy it almost fell through the front porch when it was brought to the house. It was Ora Bell's second husband who bought David his first typewriter with a stack of newsprint cut into 8 x 10 sheets and told him to get to writing.

David got his start playing Rock and Roll on flatbed trucks and in movie theaters, at skating rinks and high school dances and live TV. "'I know you got to move,' sang the Blind Boys, and I surely did. By the eighth grade, I was being asked to leave school dances because my style of dancing involved too much 'shaking.'" By the time he graduated, David had been shot at, stalked, and carried off the stage too drunk to leave under his own power by a club owner who intended for his daughter to marry him the minute either of them turned 16.

"By late 1961, it was becoming harder to get anything that sounded like rock and roll on the radio. Truth to tell, rock musicians were afraid the age of rock and roll was over. You hardly ever heard anything that sounded like a band playing anymore. The days when you could turn the dial and hear Gene Vincent or Little Richard were gone. Once in a while you could still find Fats Domino or Roy Orbison. Radio was still the only way you could hear any music in your car; this made driving a constant outrage, as you listened hour after hour trying to hear something good. The whole band used to scream at the radio. Television was much worse, of course. You could watch American Bandstand for months and not see anybody you wanted to see. If you wanted Carl Perkins, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, Dale Hawkins, Bobby Blue Bland, you were out of luck. You got Bobby Rydell and Fabian."

After a brief stint in the non-musical working world, David moved down to Birmingham and joined a working band, Jerry Woodard and the Esquires. As a member of the Esquires, Vest had an opportunity to jam with the Tommy Dorsey Band; Ace Cannon; Bill Black's Combo; Woody Herman's Herd. He hung out with Bobby Goldsboro and met Roy Orbison. After a dispute over money, David quit the band. In Birmingham, he gigged six nights a week, then did live television weekday mornings before rushing off to classes at Birmingham-Southern.

David Vest at the 2003 Safeway Waterfront Blues Festival.

He has toured with Gospel quartets such as the Sacred Aires and the Glorylanders, doing shows with the Statesmen, the Blackwood Brothers and the original Chuck Wagon Gang. "I made my first recording with the Sacred Aires, a song written for us by Alton Delmore of the Delmore Brothers, called, 'I Can't Be Satisfied.' That the first song I recorded may have been the last one he wrote moves me in strange ways."

"Then came the drugs. By that I mean that drugs crossed over into public use. Musicians had always had drugs. The first time I smoked pot, there was something elite about it. Dope was for hip cats, it wasn't for the rubes. Suddenly, now everybody had it. Within a few years even Willie Nelson was smoking it, and there was nothing cool or special about it anymore if people who looked like they worked at a feed store did it."

Vest married, settled in Birmingham, got into college and discovered modern poetry about the time he met Big Joe Turner. "If I had trouble keeping my head on straight, consider this: I'd get up before dawn, do a TV show with Tammy Wynette and Fannie Flagg, run back to campus and study Muriel Ruykeyser, Alexander Pope and Wittgenstein, then head out to the clubs to play with Big Joe, Sam the Sham, etc. I like to say that I left Birmingham-Southern with a double major, both in English. I do know that I took more hours in English than anyone in the history of the college." David states that he may very well have too much of an education for his own good.

"There was a disc jockey at a radio station in my hometown who would give me records — stuff the station didn't intend to play. I left there one night with a handful of John Lee singles. Meeting Hooker was as close as I had ever been to the source of all the music I most loved. John Lee Hooker's records sounded older than time, blacker than coal dust, rawer than an open wound, and deeper than anything they were teaching me in college."

David later went on to attend Vanderbilt University in Nashville. "I remained as conflicted as I had been in Birmingham. During the week I went to class by day but wrote fiction and poetry by night, getting my first poems published in the "Green River Review" and the "Roanoke Review." "Somehow I was convinced that all this music and all this poetry and everything else I was studying were all the same thing, really. My academic advisors were pleading with me to make choices, to do one thing and do it well, effectively to the exclusion of everything else."

"Show me someone whose life is not an appalling sequence of betrayals — of friends, lovers, mentors, institutions, principles and above all self. And yet, looking back, wouldn't we think more highly of ourselves if we'd betrayed some of them a little earlier? Early in life I might have heard a voice crying in the wilderness. It was the voice of John Lee Hooker, a life-guide as good as any other. In my childhood he went about the South, driving at night and dodging "ghostses in the road" to sing his great songs of liberation. For me, it is 'Burnin' Hell,' by John Lee Hooker that is the great American song. The fact that it is virtually unsingable by anyone else, that no glee club could ever hope to hum it, that its intractable individuality does not lend itself to any kind of communal expression — all the more reason to admire it."

Thanks in part to a summer in France, during which "I spent days on a Velosolex scooter and nights at a typewriter in the pantry, I was able to take a first novel through four drafts while at Vanderbilt. With all my course work behind me, and prelims passed, I headed off, thoroughly depressed, to 'do one thing' — fill a teaching post at Longwood College in Virginia, when I wanted to be doing three or four (playing music, writing, traveling, acting). I was 'Dr. Vest' now, or would be as soon as I completed my dissertation, but who was that? The last thing I did in Tennessee was to tie all the drafts of my novel into a neat package and throw the whole thing into the trash, saving nothing. Of my many self-betrayals, this is the one that would eat at me the hardest."

David lists as his teachers: Kate Webster; Big Walter the Thunderbird; Floyd Dixon; and, Amos Melbert — the only one with whom David has not actually performed. A few of life's highlights to date include writing the first song recorded by Tammy Wynette. He was also the first American to record in Romania, "Heart Full of Rock & Roll" on Electrecord in 1980. Another career highlight was an appearance at the 1995 New Orleans Jazz Heritage Festival.

David feels it is important for Blues musicians to think of themselves as artists and to draw inspiration from the various other forms of art.

Vest is proud to announce the fact that he will celebrate his 60th year on the second of this month. You may wish to take the opportunity to head up to Mt. Hood on Sunday, November 2nd to celebrate with this amazing musician, philosopher and poet. Maybe take a little afternoon stroll in the woods before heading over to the Ratskeller for a bite to eat and a terrific musical celebration. Sounds like a party to me.

– Rose Allen