Tea and the blues

Anil woke me with a cup of hot Darjeeling tea. The night before his wife and I along with him watched a movie where a train went through the tea crops. I was their weekend guest, although at this point after much too’ing and fro’ing for many years, it feels like a second home.

“Do you know Geechi Wiley?” http://www.thedevilsmusic.net/lyrics/geechie_wiley.html and http://www.wirz.de/music/wileyfrm.htm he asked me.

I didn’t. I am used to Anil telling me things about my own country be it history or music that go deeper than my knowledge. He brought up the song on his computer. Despite the scratchiness of the old recording, the voice was moving. The guest bed is in the computer room and I sipped the tea as we listened.

“There’s debate about the lyrics,” he said. The words bolted meal came up or so we thought.
We listened and re-listened. Neither us knew what bolted meal was. We looked that up too.

I wondered what the blues singer would have thought if she had only known that almost seventy years later another American and an Indian would be listening to her music in far away Europe.