A Blues Bug Collection
First thaw and I'm thinking about insects
Here in Hanover, the first signs of spring. Gone the stolid sun whose light only approximates sunshine. I squash ants in the kitchen with my big toe. They woke with the melt, scuttled indoors, and now reside with the slotted spoons.
Ants in My Pants
This my segue to insects in the blues. Big Bill Broonzy, “These Ants Keep Biting Me.” He has ants in his pants. Crabs. Poor Bill. “I wore holes in my pockets / I broke off my fingernails.” As someone so astutely observed in the Youtube comments, He for sure is not singing about ants! A girl gave me lice once. The kid kind: hats shared, head hairs. It was a wakeup call. She was immature.
Boll Weevil
The boll weevil is of course the bluesiest bug. A plague, a cotton-killing pest, which entered the US from Mexico via Brownsville, Texas in 1892. By 1915, the bugs had inundated the Delta.
I’m partial to Charley Patton’s “Mississippi Boweavil Blues.” Animals in the blues are typically sexual metaphors: Blind Lemon’s black snake, Robert Johnson’s milk cow. But Patton’s boll weevil is an envied other, parahuman—human and animal, or neither human nor animal, grifting the best of both like a parasite. The boll weevil eschews the logic of exile. Where’s you native home? Patton asks. Louisiana raised in Texas, least is where I was bred and born, it responds. A stateless figure, the boll weevil, but it doesn’t seem to mind, equally at peace anywhere there grows cotton and corn.
Imagine the boll weevil’s allure to Patton, whose mixed-race heritage and relative wealth made him always an outsider. The son of a former slave, the grandson of slave owners. Women loved him so men hated him, but neither knew him. In “Down the Dirt Road Blues,” he sings of going to “the Nation”—the Cherokee nation in Oklahoma—perhaps seeking solace with his Indian relatives. “But I couldn’t stay there,” he laments, forever an exile.
Haley Heynderickx’s Bug Collection
Heynderickx (yes, that’s really how she spells it) is my favorite follower of John Fahey. It seems so obvious now, her indebtedness to his fingerpicked expressionism. But I never thought about the connection until Habib said it matter-of-factly.
I am impatiently waiting for more music from Heynderickx. She has only the one album. I think the next one might make her Phoebe Bridgers-famous. Or Adrianne Lenker the better analogy, shy innovators on the acoustic guitar, songwriters who lean into abstraction.
The alt-percussion in “The Bug Collector” takes me back to elementary school. I don’t know what she’s using. Not a rain stick but something similar. Reminds me of Jonathan Richman’s dew-wet “Summer Morning,” his bees and gnats cast into the background.
Heynderickx has those nimble Fahey fingers that pick soft as clearly as loud, painting nuance with shifts in volume. Each plucked string hurries the scurry of the song’s 1,106 legs. With every chord shift, Heynderickx peeks under a rotting log, whole phrases the prismatic mist of sonic waterfalls. We’re in fertile soil. Maybe I’ll start a garden.