Music booming from Blues Can is soul-soothing

The rhythm and riffs draw me in, Laura Duker writes.

Like a true born-and-raised Calgarian, I have grown up on a steady diet of country music. Why I have been drawn to blues is a mystery to others, but not to me.

Luckily, there was a bar in Calgary that drew me to it: the Blues Can. When I divorced 13 years ago, I moved from Strathmore back to Calgary. I needed to find a bar I could call my own.

Why did I choose to go to a bar when my marriage ended rather than join a knitting group like my mother? She did every feminine craft known to man, and yet I shunned the womanly arts and chose the activity that had been a favourite of my father's: to go to a bar and drink.

My father was not very domesticated, and neither am I.

I love that bar. As I get near it, I can hear the pull of the music, loud and throbbing, blues riffs from the lead guitarist sending out melancholic vibes that draw me in. What is it about the sadness of the music that makes me feel at home?

Blues music speaks to my soul. There is a mournfulness to the music both in the lyrics and the instrumentals that appeals to me. I find my body moving to the rhythm that just feels natural. When I dance, I first follow the rumbling thunder of the drums: slow, driving, sensual.

Then, I catch the inviting rhythmic shower of the beat of the bass, a funky, melodic, repetitive, hypnotic baseline that infuses my body and is translated by my feet into a rhythmic response.

And then there is the bolt that strikes from the lead guitar, a blues line unique to each lead musician, rending itself into expressions of sorrow — B.B. King and Buddy Guy and our own Tim Williams. All of them have a wordless conversation with me through their guitars, telling me of their melancholy that is transmuted by the music into a joy of survival and connection.

I catch the inviting rhythmic shower of the beat of the bass, a funky, melodic, repetitive, hypnotic baseline that infuses my body.

I hear ya, brother. I feel the same way, too.

My body responds with twisting gyrations in answer to the haunting call.

When I got sober from alcohol five years ago, I had to stay away from the Blues Can to fulfil my goal of not drinking.

It was miserable to stay away from the place that had become my second home. Within the past six months, I have returned in earnest, focusing on the main reason I started going there: a chance to dance.

Why did I, the eldest and only daughter of a long-suffering mother, choose to go to bars instead of joining her in the womanly arts?

It had been my observation when I was a child that men and boys had a lot more fun than women and girls. I grew to resent my brothers, who seemed to be having way too much amusement for my liking.

I remember special occasions at my German grandmother's home in Bridgeland, where the men would be enjoying a beer or a whisky in the living room — the boys imbibing pops — after a fine meal (prepared solely by women), while all the females would be in the kitchen washing the dishes.

I wanted to call one of my brothers over and punch him in the face but, no, I was sequestered in the kitchen with the womenfolk. I have been jealous ever since.

If only I could write a blues song. What would it encompass? The inequities between the male and female genders? The triumph of being able to go to a bar to dance and not drink alcohol, but with all that sadness that went into getting to this point?

Every alcoholic has a blues song deep in his or her heart. Mine comes out when I dance to the blues.