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STAGE REVIEW: At Crossroads, ‘The Adventures of Fishy Waters: In Bed With the Blues’

‘In the concerts, yes, I tell stories and I play music, but this piece of work lets the audience kind of stick with one person, and get a slice of his life,’ sa

By Anthony Stoeckert
   Guy Davis didn’t grow up listening to the blues. At home as a kid, his family listened to Harry Belafonte and Babatunde Olatunji’s “Drums of Passion,” and when he finally heard the blues, it came from an unexpected source.
    “The blues is something I heard being played by some white college boys once,” Mr. Davis says. “I was at a summer camp, I thought the music belonged to them, I didn’t know whose it was. I just knew it was special. It didn’t sound like anything else I’d ever heard.”
    That was so long ago, he doesn’t remember the tune those guys in camp were playing, but he says the sounds “really woke me up.” It led to a lifelong love of the music. It also led to The Adventures of Fishy Waters: In Bed With the Blues, a one-man show Mr. Davis wrote and is starring in at Crossroads Theatre in New Brunswick, running Feb. 16-26.
    The show features classic blues songs by artists including Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell and original songs by Mr. Davis, who portrays Fishy, a fictional blues legend.
    Another important element is the stories Fishy tells the audience.
    “Some of them are tall tales, absolutely ridiculous stuff, but then some of them are meant to go to the heart and hopefully touch the part of us that makes us all very human,” Mr. Davis ýPage=005 Column=001 OK,0000.00þ says.”
    And some of them are tales of horror. The main story that Fishy tells is “how he left home and wandered into a hobo camp, and how that changed his life.”
    The stories are fiction, with most being created by Mr. Davis. Some are based on African American folk tales. Mr. Davis says a family member is one of the key inspirations behind the work.
    “The character Fishy, although he is fictional, is very loosely based on one of my uncles,” he says. “Maybe other people. too, but there’s one uncle I had who used to tell me stories about how he’d be out on the road and he’d catch a turkey and wrap it in tin foil, cook it and have it come out of the fire just as good as the turkey my mother pulled out of the oven on Thanksgiving. And once he said that, I was hooked, he had the gift of gab.”
    Mr. Davis is the son of the legendary acting couple Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, but the uncle who influenced this work, Edward Wallace, was a handyman, and in fact Fishy is also a fix-it man in addition to being a musician.
    Mr. Davis’ acting credits including appearing in the recent Broadway revival of Finian’s Rainbow and a role on One Life to Live in the 1980s. He also played Robert Johnson in Robert Johnson: Trick the Devil, an off-Broadway show about the legend of delta blues master Johnson meeting Satan.
    When asked about the difference between performing concerts and playing Fishy, he says his fictional blues creation allows him to focus more on stories.
    “In the concerts, yes, I tell stories and I play music, but this piece of work lets the audience kind of stick with one person, and get a slice of his life,” he says. So ‘The Adventures of Fishy Waters’ is meant to stand as its own piece.”
    Getting back to when he first heard the blues, Mr. Davis says that while the music spoke to him, he didn’t know about the connection it had to African Americans until he started studying it and playing it. And while his family didn’t listen to the blues, he realized that his grandparents were what he calls “blues people.”
    “They grew up around in the early 1900s, they were living the lives that was the legacy, the result of segregation and the deep South and what they called ‘separate but equal’ but was anything except equal and they had to deal with Ku Klux Klan,” he says. “So these were blues people, even though my grandmother pretty much just sang church songs. A lot of who my family is, is about the blues even if I didn’t hear the music directly in my house.”
    Fishy Waters will mark a return to Crossroads for Mr. Davis. Nearly 20 years ago, he appeared in Two Ha Ha’s and a Homeboy, at Crossroads. “I guess I was the Homeboy and my parents were the Ha Has,” he says. That piece was a compilation of dramatic pieces and stories Mr. Davis and his parents had previously performed.
    When asked what it’s like to come back to Crossroads by himself now, Mr. Davis says, “It feels good, I feel grown up. I was a grown up at the time, I fell more grown up, I feel more centered.”
    Performing with his parents, he says, was an incredible experience, but coming back and performing a one-man show is fulfilling in its own way.
    “A lot was expected of my behavior because of who my parents are,” he says. “But now I’m a parent of a 21-year-old, ýPage=005 Column=002 OK,0000.00þ I’m a more established artist, I feel myself a little differently, so I can come back there and I feel more independent, stronger and I can stand on my own legs.”
‘The Adventures of Fish Waters: In Bed With the Blues’ is on stage at the Crossroads Theatre, 7 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick, Feb. 16-26. Tickets cost $40-$65; 732-545-8100; www.crossroadstheatrecompany.org
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