![]() He liked Irish writers and Terry Southern.” He chose his words very carefully.” As Andersen recalls, “A lot of musicians don’t read, but he was one of the few who read books. He was pretty good looking and he had a poetic quality to him. ![]() “He had a couple of things working for him. “He came to town not knowing what he wanted to be - a poet, an actor, a songwriter, or a personality,” remembers his first manager, Arthur Gorson. The scene soon made room for a socially conscious generation of singers and songwriters that included Dylan, Andersen, Phil Ochs, Dave Van Ronk, and Tom Paxton. The death of such a man unifies us, and recalls to us how precious we are to one another He did not take a part-time job, he was fully employed in his defiance and his originality and his faithfulness to a ground, a style, an image of which he himself was the last and best champion exponent, a style that many of us had wanted, courted, and had not won.And finally, toward the end of his short and graceful life, he had the grace to recognize the woman to whom he had always been singing, and he courted and married Nesya and because a woman of talent and beauty does not choose lightly, she made manifest for all to plainly see the qualities of love and generosity that he had forced out of his distress. In the last few years, something happened to his voice and his guitar, something very deep and sweet entered, his timing became immaculate and we knew that we were listening to one of the finest, one of the few men singing in America and I was happy then and perhaps happier now to say that I told him that. ![]() And as we grew older, as something in the public realm corrupted itself into irrelevance, the integrity of his ambition, the integrity of his failure, became, for those who knew him,increasingly important and appealing, and he moved swiftly, with effortless intimacy into the private life of anyone who recognized him, and our private lives became for him the theaters that no one would book for him, and he sang for us in hotel rooms and kitchens, and he became that poet and that gambler, and he established a defiant style to revive those soiled archetypes. And when he could not have them, his disappointment became so dazzling, his greed assumed such purity, his appetite such honesty, and he stretched his arm so wide, that we were all able to recognize ourselves, and we fell in love with him. Kris Kristofferson had described that gambler playing his way from Nashville to Hollywood, where finally the dangers of the game were too coarse for poetry.ĭavid Blue was the peer of any singer in this country, and he knew it, and he coveted their audiences and their power, he claimed them as his rightful due. Joni Mitchell had spoken simply of that constant ambiguous lover, spoken of him over and over, before she entered the beautiful technology of jazz and virtuosity. ![]() Dylan raised up such a ragged hero many times before he turned to solace in the shadow of American Chistianity. Many of us, in our songs, had touched on the type of man that he became. Lenard Cohen's Elegy for David Blue He died running, he fell beside the square, to the street where, many years before he had begun to sing, he fell in the fullest expression of vanity and discipline. This is from my old thread but is such a moving piece, it bears repeating: DAVID BLUEĭied of a heart attack in 1982 while jogging in Washington Square, NYC. ![]()
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