“They aren’t coming. They don’t want a black driver.”
The Memphis bus driver told Camden Blues and his partner Billie this with a shrug as he hung up the phone.
The Thunder Bay couple intended to join a group bus tour but the eight-person cancellation meant the pair would be privately touring the Tennessee city known as the official home of the blues.
As the bus pulled away from the infamous Beal Street blues bars, a landscape of racial segregation and income disparity unfurled before them.
Spacious mansions still dot the roads where the cotton masters once lived.
As if other streets were other worlds, razor wire lined fences between the spray-painted buildings with their boarded up windows. Poverty, disability and obesity visibly accented the divide.
Every bridge on their route seemed fitted with a homeless encampment.
Camden Blues had been convinced anyone who has the skills to manipulate an instrument and who’s lived through a broken heart can write a song but this was the heart of the blues.
“It’s basically completely segregated. You’re either way up or you’re way down. I didn’t think it was actually that bad. Nothing has changed,” he said.
“I don’t know nothing about hard times like these people did, man. We were having kind of a hard time dealing with it, honestly. It made me question whether I even had the right to go there and play the blues.”
It’s not as if hardship had never fallen upon Camden Blues. The guitarist and singer has been living with brain cancer since 2012 and mortality’s cognizance transformed him as an artist.
After listening to reams of music while he was sick and even learning to play the saxophone, he departed from classic standards to carve out his own original stamp.
“The songs that are classified as classic blues have an emotional depth to them that is not achieved very much – if at all – these days,” he said.
“That’s why a lot of old blues records resonate. A lot of them talk about death and the nearness of death. In the time those songs were written, something gruesome could happen to you at any time. That’s just it.
“If you can’ make people feel something while you’re here, you’ve got to do it.”
His take on the style played well in Memphis.
The Thunder Bay Blues Society had nominated Camden Blues to represent the city at the 32nd International Blues Challenge, a North America-wide annual competition in the United States’ sincerest art form.
He played two nights to different sets of judges and crowds, after which he found himself eliminated among 75 per cent of quarter finalists.
Those who saw his solo electric act said he played his originals soulfully, despite pressure to perform standards.
The spectator who paid the music its highest compliment said he almost cried. Camden Blues handed out his CD like business cards and the feedback embraced the punk edge his solo act graces on the blues.
“I felt like I did pretty good. Everybody said I did pretty good,” he said.
“It comes down to what the judges think is blues. That could be anything. Everybody feels a little something different about it. I don’t’ think you’d ever get a consistent consensus to judge that.”
Camden Blues returned home to the promise he’d take the stage at the concert where his moniker was born.
At the recommendation of a fellow volunteer backstage at the 2002 Thunder Bay Blues Festival, Camden Tiura left his birth name behind to begin the transformation that led him to become Camden Blues.
He will be opening the 2016 Blues Festival on July 8, warming up the crowd for Gowan, Serena Ryder and Tom Cochrane with Red Rider.
“It’s going to be an honour to share the stage that night with all these huge Canadian acts,” he said.
“They all have established careers, excellent song writing and instrumental capabilities. Everybody on the list has a catalogue of hits. They’ve been doing it right and its nice company to be with.”
