The Sunday Musician

I do everything the hard way because my dad told me I had to, and I’m an obedient son. He said, “Ed, you always have to do things the hard way.” I thought well, okay, if Dad says I have to, I guess I have to…

In my mid-twenties I started hanging out with a guy named Rick, a fantastic gospel/R&B player who was light years ahead of me as a musician. He knew ALL the chords, wrote arrangements and played several instruments. I hung on his every word and looked over his shoulder as much as I could. Before he started attending the same church as me, he played at a big, kinda-famous, predominantly black church that placed choir albums on the gospel charts and spawned a nationally-known act that signed with Motown. He was a hot keyboard player. I thought I was hot, until I met Rick. Okay, I still thought I could keep up. That is, until I tried to play Amazing Grace along with the guys at the black Pentecostal church.

A singer named Dave was trying to make a name for himself (other than ‘Dave’), and had scheduled a concert at the kinda-famous black church. Rick was running the band, and he invited me to sit in with those really hot players.  I struggled to keep up at rehearsal--there was precious little in the way of written music to look at, and everyone seemed to automatically know things I struggled to understand.  I felt like I'd missed a meeting.  Actually, I had--I'd missed about twenty years of meetings where these guys honed their chops onstage every Sunday. 

Somehow the concert had been advertised with the wrong date, and although we went ahead with it anyway, there was absolutely no audience other than a few family and friends.  We pressed on, it went okay, and as a closer we did Amazing Grace.  Rick started passing around solos--something I didn't know he was going to do.  Up to this point I'd always planned out all my solos, and I wasn't ready.  He pointed to John the guitar player, and John did a wonderful, soulful, bluesy, improvised 16 bars. 

I thought, "Shoot - I can handle this", but as I stumbled through, the guitar solo ringing in my ears, I realized I had nothing. My face burned, and if my Rhodes electric piano hadn’t been so heavy, I would have picked it up and run out the back of the church. Afterward a woman from the audience came up and threw her arms around the guitar player, telling him how inspired she was by his solo. This is the guitar player whose hand I had to hold during a recording session because he didn’t know any big chords.

I thought it was all about how much information I had, but I was wrong—it had to do with whether or not I could move people with my playing. I couldn't.  Afterward Rick said, “You gotta learn to play the blues.” I started at it.

Ten or twelve years later I played in a big Easter production, and at the end of the first act we darkened the stage, fogged it, and when the lights came up I was alone onstage with a keyboard, playing the intro to Amazing Grace. The spotlight hit Cort the sax player, and we started a slow, 6/8 gospel version of the song, building through three verses. The band joined on the second verse, and we brought the house down—in part because of my gospel piano style and the arrangement I’d cooked up. As the people applauded, I was surprised to find myself thinking of that failure from 10 years earlier. I could swear I heard God—my heavenly Dad—say, “Here ‘ya go Ed. A little something for the effort.”

Click to hear the recording (a studio version we did several years later)