Over the years, I’ve discovered that, as the name suggests, the Bessie Smith Strut is very much an event to be enjoyed in motion.
Given the chaotic sprawl of Chattanooga’s biggest block party, it’s hard to imagine trying to take it in from one place. Your average strutter engages in stick-and-move guerrilla tactics, pausing just long enough to grab a hot fish sandwich, Polish sausage or Cajun pie before moving on.
It’s a little like we’re 50,000 sharks all swimming a slow-motion circuit up and down M.L. King Boulevard. We can’t slow down or we’ll sink.
When I first made my way through the screen of barbecue smoke to take up the strut, I found myself moving in formation with Horace Hatcher and his wife, Reba.
Hatcher moved away to New York in 1971, but he’s come back this year specifically for the Strut. As we rolled along, he told me he loves the sheer spectacle of it.
“This place is going to fill up in a few minutes, and I can’t wait to see it,” he said. “It’s indescribable to put into words the aura of the blacks and whites coming together and filling up this place.”
And fill up it did. Because there were only two stages this year (Miller Plaza had music, but it wasn’t officially part of the Strut), the mass of humanity was more compacted than normal.
I loved it. One of the highlights of my year is looking down the boulevard at a slowly swirling mass of humanity beneath a gray curtain of grill smoke.
This year, I tried harder than ever to hover near the stages to try to take in the music because I love how the blues, almost more than any other genre, lives or dies off the artist’s emotional commitment to the performance. When a bluesman is fully committed, it makes for great live performances, and boy did we have some killer ones this year.
My first stop was to hear Otis Taylor on the Bessie Smith Hall Stage. A few songs in, he looked out over the then-sparsely populated lawn and told us all to move in.
“The closer you come to me, the better I play,” he said.
That was fine with us. After all, that’s where the shade was. Within about a minute, we were all bunched up at his feet.
There’s a kind of feedback loop of energy that develops when a crowd is that close to the performer, and Taylor was eating it up.
Taylor’s band is certainly not blues standard. He finger picks his electric guitar, which is strange (unless you’re Lindsey Buckingham or Mark Knopfler). He also swirls a lot of psychedelic flavor into the mix, which makes it closer to being trance blues.
Then there’s Anne Harris, Taylor’s fiddler, who I swear must moonlight as an acrobat when she’s not adding some tasty licks to Taylor’s style. I used to think Celtic Woman had a lock down on leaping around while bowing, but clearly, nobody told Harris that.
From there, I strutted down to hear The Soul Rebels Brass Band at the other end of the street. I arrived too early, but I managed to catch Eric Steckel working his guitar so fast and furiously I wondered what it had done to offend him. He had serious technical chops.
But that’s the great thing about the Strut. It’s an event that doesn’t live or die exclusively on the music or the food. It’s how it all fits together. It’s got lovable rough edges and a lot of kitsch, but that’s what makes it so endearing, what gives it its undeniable charm.
The music is certainly important, but even if you only hear it for a few minutes of every circuit, there’s always something to keep you moving forward.